Good Books Lately

I'm resurrecting this blog after months and months of dormancy. I could blame the summer, the new book I'm working on, or any number of things, but the truth is: Blogging is hard for me. I'm one of those people who enjoy Twitter and Facebook with their brief status updates. But sometimes, I need more space to talk about fun things, like writing, craft, characters, books, movies, and other stuff :-)

Good books lately. Have you read any? I definitely have. I've read some pretty bad stuff too, but we won't discuss those (*cough* Fifty Shades of Grey *cough*) :-) 

Two of the best books I read this summer:

What took me so long to read ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD? The voice of the main character, Cas, hooked me right from the first page. He was just a fabulous narrator--I don't know how else to explain it. This book did not shy away from the scary bits AT ALL. Or the nasty, bloody, or bone crunching bits. Or the downright tragic and stomach-twisting bits. All sorts of bits. It was all just so... awesome. I'll definitely read the second book but not because this one left me hanging. I'll read it because I loved Cas and Anna and I don't want things to be over for them.

SISTER by Rosamund Lupton was my book club pick for July. If you're part of a book club, you know how awful it is to be stuck with a book to read that you can't stand. You want to finish it because you should, and because you don't want to be sitting there silent and ignorant while gorging on chips and dip. Thankfully, SISTER was a book that everyone read and enjoyed (Yay!) What made it so special, I think, was the way the story was told. The first-person narrator, Beatrice, is telling the story as if she is narrating a very long, very detailed letter to her sister, Tess. It's not a spoiler to say that Tess is discovered dead early on in the book, and yet Bea continues to talk to Tess, telling her how she, Bea, never believed what the police did: that Tess killed herself. This is a mystery, but it's so much more than that. It's heart-wrenching and terrifying, and the structure (ie: "I thought about telling him that your phone was unplugged when I arrived.") is inventive and unique. And though it's a bit strange at first, it ends up working really, really well.

What books have you read this summer?