My Thoughts: Two Way Street By Lauren Barnholdt

I have never laughed as much in a book and I did in Two-Way Street by Lauren Barnholdt. It was one of the funniest books I have ever read.

There are two sides to every breakup.
This is Jordan and Courtney, totally in love. Sure, they were an unlikely high school couple. But they clicked; it worked. They're even going to the same college, and driving cross-country together for orientation.
Then Jordan dumps Courtney -- for a girl he met on the Internet.
It's too late to change plans, so the road trip is on. Courtney's heartbroken, but figures she can tough it out for a few days. La la la -- this is Courtney pretending not to care.
But in a strange twist, Jordan cares. A lot.
Turns out, he's got a secret or two that he's not telling Courtney. And it has everything to do with why they broke up, why they can't get back together, and how, in spite of it all, this couple is destined for each other

When I first read the synopsis for this book it was something I wanted to read right away. Who wouldn't? It looked to be hilarious. I was imagining the spats that would take place, and was giggling even before I read the book.

Barnholdt knows what goes on in the minds of teenage girls and their friends (and how totally unreasonable they can be). There is a scene in the book where Courtney talks about sending Jordan an e-mail and how it took her (and her friend) two hours to compose, this had me roaring because it's so true, when us girls are trying to be cool and aloof when writing something to a boy it takes us forever to find the right words; usually the boys don't even notice the difference. The story was full of ridiculous antics that had me laughing out loud.

The characters were so much fun as well. Jordan and Courtney were great but their best friends BJ and Jocelyn were two of the funniest characters I have ever read about. They are a dysfunctional couple that should not have been together. I looked forward to every interaction with one of these characters. They were a real comic relief. I almost wish they had a book of their own. They were that entertaining.

However, as much as I loved this book I find that I have a little bit of a problem with it being geared for a 13-17 year old crowd (this is what it says on Chapters website). This book is full of sexual content that I think would not be suitable for someone younger then 16. There is also a fair bit of swearing that would make it more inappropriate for younger readers.

But in all, I really enjoyed reading this book I thought it was clever and funny and the characters worked for me. It was a good read, and I looking forward to reading more from Barnholdt, and I will be rereading this one for sure.

Happy Reading Everyone.

Kim Harrington: CLARITY ARC GIVEAWAY

Kim Harrington: CLARITY ARC GIVEAWAY: "So it's December 1st and Clarity comes out in THREE MONTHS! What? You can't wait until March 1st? You want a signed ARC (advanced review cop..."

Super cool give away. I'd check it out if I were you!

From Book to Movie

When I first saw this trailer, I thought to myself "this would totally make a good book". Little did I know that it already was. I haven't read Beastly by Alex Flinn yet, but I plan to. I mean who wouldn't enjoy a modern day telling of Beauty and the Beast.

The movie doens't look to bad either.

Happy Reading

My Thoughts: Love You Hate You Miss You By Elizabeth Scott

What would you do if your best friend died? Not just died, but died while you were with them. It's an insane idea, one that is so freaky and so that you don't even want to think about it. But this is exactly what happens to 16 year old Amy in Elizabeth Scott's Love You Hate You Miss You.

It's been seventy-five days, and Amy still doesn't know how she can possibly exist without her best friend Julia, especially since it's her fault that Julia's dead. When her shrink tells her it would be a good idea to start a diary, Amy starts writing letters to Julia instead. But as she writes letter after letter, she begins to realize that the past wasn't as perfect as she thought it was"and the present deserves a chance, too.

I really liked this book. Even though I found it very very difficult to read, because it made me very very sad. Not once did I get annoyed with the main character (like I sometimes do). I felt sad for her, she was going thought a lot, at times I did wish that she would say what she was thinking and open up like she often wanted to. But then again that wouldn't have made for a very good book.

Amy wasn't perfect, she definitely had some issues. She fought through them and I really liked that. She made an effort. She tried. This is the first book by Elizabeth Scott that I have read and I have a few more that I would like to read, and I am looking forward to that. I was very pleased with this one.

So that's it. No more from me till after Wednesday.

Happy Reading.

Books I have and have not read

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your BLOG. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. And just for fun add "movie" for the ones you saw the movie only for . Tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Movie)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulkner

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger



20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Movie)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Movie)

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Movie)



30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Movie)



40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding



50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon



60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Movie)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Movie)

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie



70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Movie)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (Movie)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (Movie)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray



80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (Movie)

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (Movie)

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Movie)

Total Read: 15

Total Attempted to Read: 7

Not to shabby if I say so myself.

Happy Reading everyone!

Blast From The Past: The Hunter's Moon by OR Melling

The Hunter's Moon By O.R. Melling
16 year old Gwen is spending the summer in Ireland with her cousin Findabhair. The two have always looked for doors into the other world, but did they really expect to find them? When Findabhair is kidnapped by the High King of Faerie, Gwen must chase the fairy court around Ireland to try and save her cousin. But does Findabhair want to be saved? And what dark secret lies behind the fun and the shimmer of magic?

(The original cover from when I first read this book in 1996)




One of the very first books that I remember reading was The Hunter's Moon by O.R. Melling. I was in the fourth grade when I read it which would mean that I was nine which thinking back was maybe a little young to be reading a book about 16 year olds and their loves. I think it was this book that made me fall in love with books and reading. Because it was such an amazing tale. It was so intense and scary and so much fun. It was an epic adventure for me. I loved every minute of it. There was so much going on and Gwen met so many amazing people on her adventure. Some you hated (well wanted to, but couldn't really) and some you loved. I adore this story and have read it numerous times.

When I found out it was not in print anymore I think I cried (I'd borrowed the original from the school library so I did not own it). But on my 16th birthday my mom surprised me with The Chronicles of Faerie, which was a publication of The Hunter's Moon, The Summer King and The Light Bearer's Daughter (all part of the same story). All of these stories are amazing but nothing (well to me at least) like The Hunter's Moon. I think The Hunter's Moon is back in print and farily easy to get a hold of, so if you can, do.

So there is my little trip down memory lane, happy reading everyone.

My Thoughts: Something Like Fate by Susane Colasanti

I generally love drama (which is totally pathetic I know). I think it's fun and entertaining and the more dramatic a situation is, the better. So when I read the synopsis for Something Like Fate by Susane Colasanti I was pretty excited. The story looked like it would be full of drama:


Best friends Lani and Erin couldn't be more different. Lani's reserved and thoughtful; Erin's bubbly and outgoing. Lani likes to do her own thing; Erin prefers an entourage. There's no possible way they could be interested in the same guy.
So when Erin starts dating Jason, Lani can't believe she feels such a deep connection with him-and it may be mutual. The more Lani fights it, the more certain she feels that it's her fate to be with Jason. But what do you do when the love of your life is the one person you can't have?

It's true the story was pretty dramatic, but not in a good way. I thought maybe it was a little over done (which is strange coming from me).

I found Erin and Lani's friendship to be a little bit tiresome. Erin was bossy and self-centered and I often wondered why Lani chose to stay friends with her; I found the whole concept that it was because Erin saved her life a little weak. I loved Lani because she's loyal, but when Erin finds out about her and Jason and then what she is put through and how she just takes it, that really drove me insane. I found myself screaming "come on, stick up for yourself!" What she did wasn't great, but really it was also not that big a deal.

I loved Blake though and the relationship he had with Lani. I thought "now there a real friendship" one that gives and receives, and I was so heart broken for Lani when Blake blames her for outing him, because she felt so bad. That was a pretty sad part.

There were other things that I did not like about the book, but there is no need to go into detail. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I were 10 years younger, I do realise that this book is a YA but I have read YA as an adult and enjoyed it. So...

Something Like Fate wasn't terrible but it wasn't very good either.

On a side note. I may not be posting much in the next week and a half. School is winding down which means assignments and tests are on full throttle. Which means I won't be reading much. But after the Dec 1st I have a little bit of time before exams start. Hopefully.

Until then,

Happy Reading