Karen over at Sassymonkeyreads.ca just came out with her “How Much the Library Saved Me This Year” post: over $1300!!!  I felt inspired to do the same, although I’ll note that I grabbed the cheapest price from Amazon, regardless of which version I read or prefer, because it was easier and I always buy the cheapest version I can, so that I can buy MORE BOOKS.

2010: saved $151.04

2011: saved $210.45

2012 (so far): saved $23.55

Total: 47 books checked out and actually read

While my numbers aren’t nearly as staggering as Karen’s, I LOVE that I got to try out so many books.  Several books I first read from the library are now favorites, such as The Name of the Wind! (That copy was so battered that it was actually missing a chunk, and while the obsessive-compulsive in me was grossed out, the book lover was excited because a book must be something special to be that abused after such a short amount of time.  And that theory was CORRECT, ladies and gentlemen.)

What this also reminds me of is that I buy a LOT of books. My parents got me a Kindle for Christmas 2010, and while my library usage increased in 2011, my book buying also increased dramatically because that one-click button is so, so easy, and Kindle is instant gratification.

Happy reading!

“Anna is looking forward to her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a great job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. Which is why she is less than thrilled about being shipped off to boarding school in Paris – until she meets Etienne St. Clair: perfect, Parisian (and English and American, which makes for a swoon-worthy accent), and utterly irresistible. The only problem is that he’s taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her almost-relationship back home.”

Many of my favorite YA authors and book bloggers have been raving about Anna and the French Kiss since it debuted in December 2010, and I was nervous about it.  France?  Bleh.  Girl upset about going abroad?  Yeesh.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

Stephanie Perkins’ debut is lovely, witty and engaging.  Her writing is excellent, not only in phrasing and word choice, but in her complex sentence structure.  Here’s the last paragraph of chapter one.  Anna is in France, in her dorm room, unpacking with her parents.

“And then my mother does something that, even after all of the paperwork and plane tickets and presentations, I don’t see coming.  Something that would’ve happened in a year anyway, once I left for college, but that no matter how many days or months of years I’ve yearned for it, I am still not prepared for when it actually happens.

“My mother leaves. I am alone.”

Despite feeling alone in a country whose language she does not speak, Anna makes friends with several of the other American teenagers at the boarding school.  They take her out into the city, where she learns that France is the film appreciation capital of the world, which is convenient as Anna is an absolute film nut.  I liked that element, because it rounded out her character nicely and gave Anna something to do in the book besides swoon over St. Clair and fixate on Toph, her crush in Atlanta.  St. Clair has been dating a girl named Ellie, who is one year older than their crowd and is attending college in France.  She pops up infrequently, and her absence gives Anna and St. Clair the chance to become very good friends, and share about their lives and families.  Anna’s father is a sell-out jerk, but he loves his kids.  He is written in such a way to poke fun at Nicholas Sparks and his novels that all end with people dying of cancer or in house fires and the sad, lonely people they leave behind.  St. Clair’s father is a legitimately nasty person who doesn’t let St. Clair see his mother, who is delightful.

What I loved about Anna and the French Kiss is that the idea that two people can meet, and attraction aside, still become best friends.  There is an email exchange about 2/3 of the way through the book where they have both gone back to the US for Christmas, and quite honestly, it’s my favorite part of the book.  When I finished it, I felt bereft.  The novel was over?  I needed more. I finished it on December 27th, and read it again last weekend after finishing the companion novel Lola and the Boy Next Door, which was also lovely.  (Review coming soon.)

4 stars and a HOLY WHOA for Anna and the French Kiss.  The Top 10 of 2011 post was already published by the time I read Anna, but it’s definitely worthy of the list.

“Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds.

“Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history—or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice.

“One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn, who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will.  After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs.”

Mistborn was a great novel with an incredibly innovative magic system – people called Allomancers are able to ingest certain metallic alloys, which give them special abilities like pushing or pulling metal, increased strength, heightened senses, and more.

Plot:

Overall good. It wasn’t as … full as all the other Sanderson books, which are substantially longer.  Wax returns to the city, where he forcefully pushes down the part of himself that is an Allomancer and yearns to leap out into the mists, right wrongs, and deliver justice.  Then a mysterious group called the Vanishers starts robbing trains and kidnapping women, someone tries to kill him, and Wax gets sucked in, together with his hilarious companion, Wayne, and the lovely young Marasi.  The Western setting was radically different from the more traditional fantasy world we all became familiar with in the Mistborn series, and the advanced technology really changed how Allomancy and Feruchemy were utilized.  There weren’t any true Mistborn (with all the allomantic powers) in Alloy of Law, which I missed, if only because I enjoyed Vin and Kelsier’s antics so much.

Characterization:

Great.  Even with less pages, Sanderson wrote and developed a set of complex, memorable characters.  Wayne, with his obsession with accents and disguises, was by far my favorite.  Marasi fell a little flat for me as compared to the strong, Mistborn Vin, but I did admire her intelligence and knowledge of criminal justice.  The relationship between Wax and Miles, who used to be colleagues, if not strictly friends, was excellent and lent tension to the action.  Miles was a particularly insidious villain because he was smart, he knew his enemy, and he couldn’t be hurt or killed like normal people.  He made a strong argument for his actions, and sometimes Wax agreed with him, which only made their conflict more interesting.

Writing

Since this was a shorter novel for Sanderson (336 pages compared to his usual 600-700+), the style was very different.  Usually, Sanderson switches between three or more perspectives, since his novels are so long and involve multiple plot lines that may or may not eventually come together at the end.  This story was told almost entirely from Wax’s perspective, although we get a peek into Miles’ (the bad guy) perspective occasionally.  Wax was an interesting narrator and character, though made more likeable by his cheeky sidekick Wayne.

The book wasn’t quite what I expected, and I wasn’t able to dig into it the way I usually do with Sanderson novels.  My expectations of a favorite author were a bit too high, and Alloy was slightly underwhelming for all the hype it generated.  Also, I’ve never enjoyed Westerns, and Alloy had some very classic Western moments including a shootout on top of a speeding train.  None of that is the book’s fault, and The Alloy of Law was an interesting diversion while we wait for the next big Sanderson novel.  Still, I enjoyed it, and it was nice to read something new by Sanderson.  He just finished the initial draft of A Memory of Light, and hopefully after that, he’ll start on the second book in the Stormlight Archive.

Top 10 Tuesday is a meme by Broke and Bookish and today’s theme is Top 10 Books of 2011!  These are all books I read for the

very first time in 2011, regardless of when they were published.

(I’m trying out this meme thing since I’ve been a sluggish poster in 2011.  Do you like memes because they keep bloggers posting consistently or do they annoy you?  Let me know.  I’m open to suggestion.)

Sorry for the extremely odd spacing below … I battled with WordPress and it won.  I accept defeat.  Review links for everything below are on the 2011 page (or will be soon).

The Name of the Wind and Divergent were my big two “HOLY WHOA!” books of 2011.  So far, I’ve read a lot of books I’ve enjoyed, but none that packed quite the punch of those two.

EDIT: Anna and the French Kiss has made the holy whoa list for 2011!

“Sing the Light, Sing the Warmth, and Receive the Gift comprise the trilogy of The Singers of Nevya, completed in 1997. A follow-up novel, Singer in the Snow, was published in 2004. These novels, unlike my other works, are science fantasy, which is to say they are soft science fiction with one fantastic element, in this case, the psi, or telepathic powers of the Singers who create warmth and light for their people. Nevya is an ice world, a planet under a binary star system (see, a little science sneaks in), where summer comes only once every five years, and the ground is frozen so that metal is impossible to obtain.”

The trilogy has been out of print for some time, but the omnibus is available on Amazon for $6.99.  So far, I’m enjoying it.  It’s also pretty short: all three volumes come to a mere 504 pages.

Plot:

Excellent. I loved the whole setting of the ice planet where summer comes around once every five years.  The Singers are vital to this society because they create the only pockets of light and warmth on the planet.  Marley’s descriptions of the quiru (the warmth and light bubbles) were beautiful, and I could easily imagine the Singers as they played their filla (flutes) or filhata (harps), light and warmth radiating from them and sweeping into the farthest corners of the House.  Our heroine is Sira, the youngest and most gifted of the Singers at Conservatory.  She earns her rank and is assigned to House Bariken to be their junior Cantrix, but is not prepared for the cultural shift between the rest of Nevya and Conservatory.  The world-building here was truly great, and I have already started book 2 of the omnibus.

Characterization:

Good.  Sira has never been in danger or been actively threatened while inside Conservatory, and the events of the novel really stretch her and change her as a character.  As in many novels, she starts out naive, warmhearted, and innocent, and as the plot advances and she experiences the world, that innocence fades or is lost altogether.  You get a glimpse at Sira’s thoughts fairly often, but those thoughts aren’t necessarily deep.  Theo, who really isn’t present or important until the last third or so of the novel, doesn’t change much at all.  He is jovial and kind, and as an itinerant Singer not trained at Conservatory, his worldview is much broader than Sira’s.  Marley allows the reader a glimpse into a few more characters’ minds, like Maestra Lu and Isbel, but they are secondary and serve only to provide information about Sira.  This isn’t to say they are flat characters, but they serve only as background to Sira and her role in the story.  If the novel had been longer, there would have been room for deeper character development, but for the length, I thought Marley did a fine job.

Writing:

Great!  I really enjoyed Marley’s writing style.  Everything about her writing reminds the reader that outside the (relative) safety of the quiru, a deadly ice planet lies in wait.  The way she describes the music is indicative of her experience as an opera and concert singer, and I like to imagine that she had some excellent songs in her head while she was describing the Singers’ tunes.

3.5 stars for an excellent book!

“When Trei loses his family in a tragic disaster, he must search out distant relatives in a new land. The Floating Islands are unlike anything Trei has ever seen: stunning, majestic, and graced with kajurai, men who soar the skies with wings.

“Trei is instantly sky-mad, and desperate to be a kajurai himself.  The only one who fully understands his passion is Araene, his newfound cousin.  Prickly, sarcastic, and gifted, Araene has a secret of her own . . . a dream a girl cannot attain.

“Trei and Araene quickly become conspirators as they pursue their individual paths.  But neither suspects that their lives will be deeply entwined, and that the fate of the Floating Islands will lie in their hands. . . .”

Plot:

Good. I felt that Trei made it into the kajurai too easily, but then again, once he got in, the flight and culture training were both well-described and really had me enjoying the Trei scenes.  I liked Araene’s particular adventure, since it differed from her original “dream a girl cannot attain.”  Both the kajurai and the school Araene attends are rich in detail, and the world-building here is superb.  It felt complete, like Neumeier knows the world in her mind to every exact detail, right down to the grain of the wood on an obscure doorway somewhere in the school where the reader never even knew existed.

Characterization:

Good. Trei is constantly questioning who should receive his loyalty: the Islands, with their magical kajurai, who accept him and never make him feel bad about being a half-blood, or the Tolounne (spelling?) Empire, who are skilled at the art of war, but endlessly fair and ordered?  I liked that he didn’t go to the Islands and immediately see only the evils of his previous home. It made for a very realistic internal dilemma.

Araene was okay as a character.  You find out quickly that she’s been dressing as a boy for a while to do things girls are not allowed to do, like attend classes at the University.  She thinks about how a boy would walk, speak, and interact with other boys, but as the novel progresses, she abandons that careful precision and slips into habits a teenaged boy would not likely do, like cuddling and stroking the hair of a crying child.

Writing:

Fine; not spectacular, but also not bland. If anything, the writing style was forgettable while the story itself was not.

Overall, an excellent read. 3.5 stars!

“It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . .

“Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.

“This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.”

Zusak won the Printz award in 2007 for “The Book Thief,” John Green loved it, fellow book bloggers raved about it: by all accounts, I’d been missing something truly epic by not reading it until now.

Death was the narrator and lens for the entire novel, and I really, really liked that.  You know, even as you’re reading, that the characters die, because everyone dies, and that Death is looking back at their lives as he has looked at billions of lives before theirs.  It lent an air of suspense because he told you one of the characters dies young, so I kept waiting for that person to die and they just kept living, chapter after chapter until the last quarter or so of the book.  I didn’t want him to die, but when the narrator says he’s going to, I can’t help but expect that to happen on the next page.

Liesel falls in love with words and stories.  She read whatever she could get her hands on, no matter what it was.  She didn’t have access to fairy tales with princesses and heroes with dashing horses and silver swords, but she loved the stories she found and treasured them.  It made me appreciate the fact that I have the privilege to be selective about what I read, that I skim over the ingredients on the cereal box and countless other words on a daily, hourly basis without thinking about it, because reading and words are as ubiquitous to me as breathing air or drinking water.

What really makes the book, though, is the setting.  Each and every page, event, character, and dialogue reminds you that this is Nazi Germany.  This character might die in two paragraphs just for looking at someone in the wrong way.  The tension regarding Jews in the community (or hiding in the basement), the lack of food, the cold, the political pressure on Hans Huberman, Liesel’s book thieving: it all circles back to Hitler and the negative effect he had on Germans and the world.  You could feel the fear, but the defiance was more powerful.  Liesel stole books and read what Hitler would not have wanted her to read.  Hans Huberman didn’t hate Jews, and hid Max in the basement when Hitler would have put him in a concentration camp.  These characters were hardened and made brave by a terrible time in history, and they were so very strong through it all.

I liked The Book Thief and it lived up to the hype.  It wasn’t what I expected, but I’m very glad of that.