Shades of Grey giveaway winner

I took everyone's name that entered the Shades of Grey giveaway and I put all the names in a hat. Then I asked Boyfriend+ to pick one of the names so we would have our winner. He asked for a cut so I asked him if that meant he'd take take a few pages out of the book. I talked him out of it but know you almost had to call him to get the last pages.

And the winner is...

Mariana @ And so it goes...

I'll shoot you an email, get your address, and then this book will be yours!!

If anyone is sad they didn't win, blame Boyfriend+. Or Franzen. Cos it's October and I plan on blaming Franzen a lot this month.

September Reading Wrap-Up

Fall is here. Officially and whatnot. The pumpkin spicing of ALL THE THINGS has commenced. Also I would really like a pumpkin mocha breve from Fangirl but all of the versions of it I've heard about require about 5 minutes just to say the order. So perhaps Starbucks could just make it a menu item? I would appreciate that.

Hey remember in August how I managed to read some non-white people and books that were older than me? Yeah, that didn't so much happen in September. Whoops. It's a bit upsetting that in order to be more diverse I have to really work at it. It doesn't just come naturally. Except with lady authors. I'm pretty happy with the frequency I read lady authors considering it takes no additional effort other than "these books look like exactly the type of thing I would enjoy." And with that, onto the stats!

Number of books read
5
Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Stories by Simon Rich
Horns by Joe Hill
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Number of pages read
1,871

Percentage of fiction
100% - I reject your real world

Percentage of female authors
40%

Percentage of white authors
100%

Percentage of US authors
80%

Percentage of ebooks
40%

Percentage of review copies
0%

Books written by decade
1990s - 20%
2010s - 80%

Perhaps there's hope October will have more diversified reading, but given I'll also be hosting The Corrections readalong which means I will most likely be leaning on comfort reads in between chapters. We shall see.

What do you do with multiple copies of books?

Do you ever find you have multiple copies of the same book? Maybe you forgot you already had a copy? Maybe you're combining bookshelves? Maybe you just REALLY like that story and feel the need to have all the copies?

I was sitting on the floor near one of our bookshelves the other day, scanning the shelves with Boyfriend+'s books, and I saw some of his Shakespeare. Because like me, Boyfriend+ can't throw out any of his books, including those he bought for class. And I realized we have a LOT of copies of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Then I started going through to find what other books we had multiple copies of. Here's some of what I found.

6 copies of Midsummer.
This is mostly my fault. I have a problem.

From top to bottom we have:
-Boyfriend+'s copy from the Folger Library*
-A copy in both English and Italian. Because why not
-An Arden copy, which my Grandmother got me for my 14th birthday (I don't have that good of memory but she wrote Happy Birthday and the date on the first page)
-A copy of The Complete Comedies
-A Complete Works that one of my university classes made me buy because she insisted we couldn't use smaller books. I used smaller books the entire semester. TAKE THAT, SOCIETY
-A First Folio copy my good friend got me when he visited London. (I've since acquired As You Like It and Hamlet as well)

2 copies of The Great Gatsby
Or 3 if you consider we also have a poster made up of the text of the book. Plus Boyfriend+ and I each have the same copy. And neither of us our willing to give up "our" book.

4 copies of The Odyssey
2 are Boyfriend+'s. 2 are mine. I had a professor insist we buy a specific version for his class but I already owned one. And in all fairness, I liked that translation better than the one I already owned, so fine. I don't know why he has so many.

2 copies each of The Iliad and The Aeneid 
We each have our own copies of these 2. And I swear I had a different version of The Iliad at some point. But I can't find it so maybe 2 1/4?

3 copies of Shades of Grey
Not 50 shades. This is the Fforde book. We don't know how many shades. Just more than one.
This was the second book I bought on my Kindle because I wanted to read it RIGHT NOW. And then I found a paperback copy on sale and I really wanted a copy for my shelf. And then my friend (he who bought me Midsummer cos he knows me really well) found a hardback copy on sale and picked it up for me.

And now I have a copy FOR YOU! He actually gave this to me awhile ago so I could do this giveaway except then I couldn't figure out a reason for giveaway post. I have a tendency to forget birthdays, including blog birthdays, so that didn't happen. I haven't read any new Fforde to use that as an excuse. I thought about just giving it away and then never wrote that post either. But now this is a good excuse!

So this is open to anyone. Just leave your name and email address in the comments and, in a week? Let's say a week, I'll randomly pick a winner!


*I actually really like their copies. If you're looking for Shakespeare, I recommend these guys

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto

I tried to write this review of Joe Hill's Horns over the weekend. I started it by apologizing for not posting more last week and blamed Franzen for it*. And then I realized I should probably give some thought into a readalong schedule cos I hadn't done that yet. Then I was exhausted after putting that together and decided instead of finishing up (or really starting) this review my time would be better spent with a West Wing marathon. Which I now realize sort of gives the impression that I didn't enjoy Horns and the opposite is true. I'm just very easily distracted.

I won a copy of Horns from Kayleigh** which is awesome and thank you for that! I really didn't know anything about it before her review (which you should check out) except that Harry Potter was going to be in this weird movie where he plays a guy that has horns. It's also written by Stephen King's son, but I guess he doesn't want you to know that cos he changed his name. Of course if it was really a sekrit he wouldn't have done that NYT article. I don't know if I would have figured it out had I not known they were related before I started reading it, but I kept getting the feeling that if you told me this was a Stephen King book, I wouldn't have even questioned you.

So, right, the plot. Ignatius Perrish wakes up one morning with a particularly heinous hangover and, oh yeah, he's grown horns. Things had already been pretty shitty for Ig. His long-time girlfriend Merrin had been found raped and murdered a year earlier and even though charges were never brought up against him everyone in town assumes Ig did it, and he got away with it because of his families money and connections.

Ig's still trying to get a handle on the whole horns thing when he wanders out to the living room and he sees his roommate/fuck buddy Glenna sitting on the couch. She doesn't seem to notice the horns. She does start telling him weird things. Not just telling him things, like how she gave a friend of theirs a blog job the other day, but asking permission from Ig to do things she knows she shouldn't. It seems these horns make people want to confess their deepest desires and are just looking for an excuse to act on these impulses. Ig's become a devil-on-the-shoulder for everyone he goes near, even though Ig isn't a particularly devilish character. But he's been given an opportunity to perhaps find out the truth and perhaps move on. And now the book becomes a whodunnit/revenge thriller.

I really loved Ig's character. He's not what I expected, which is good, because the character I was expecting would have been boring. Ig is tortured by Merrin's death and by the fact that everyone has turned on him. He's so hurt and he has no one. And he has no idea what happened to Merrin. He only knows that he's innocent, despite what everyone may believe.

The book is a lot of things. Like I said above, it's a whodunnit and a revenge story and a thriller. It also provides some interesting insights to "the devil inside" and there's some dark humor there. Oh and supernatural, you know, what with the horns and all. But it does a good job keeping everything from getting too muddled.

I agree with Kayleigh that I liked present day Ig and that story more than the flashbacks. I liked the flashbacks and thought they were interesting and they added some good twists and motivations to the present day story. But then went on for a long time and I kept glancing ahead to see how long before we got back to horned Ig. Maybe if those sections had been broken up more I wouldn't have minded them as much.

Overall this was a great book. If you like King (Laaaaura) you should give Hill a try. If you're not a fan of horror maaaybe give this a pass, although I wouldn't say this is necessarily a scary book. It's a very good book. I realize I only mentioned Ig and obviously as the main character you spend the most time with him. The others are...it seems wrong to say "fun" to watch but I was invested in their stories. Even when at times I wanted to turn away.

*Expect to see me blaming Franzen for a lot of things over the next month. Subway delays? Dammit, Franzen.
**She also sent me these crazy chocolate candy bars that have pop rocks and jelly beans in them. I'm pretty sure we have no equivalent of them over here and I think this just means I'm going to need to make a trip to her land to stock up.

Title quote from page 255

Hill, Joe. Horns. Orion Books, 2010.

Corrections Readalong: The Schedule

Apologies for slacking on posts last week. What can I say, just the thought of hosting this Corrections readalong is exhausting.

I was actually in the middle of writing a review of Horns (to be posted later this week...hopefully) when I realized I should probably at least start to figure out the reading schedule for Corrections. I determined roughly how many pages we should read and then I thought I'd find a chapter break around there. Hey, guess what this book doesn't have many of. Chapters! God, Franzen, you're such an asshole.

I now understand why my professors would beg us to all buy the same copy of the book, this way they could just say "read through page 250" and page 250 would be the same for everyone. But I'm going to assume we all have our own copies and just using page numbers won't work. So here's what I figured, but please, if anyone has a better idea, speak up. Because this is already a mess and we haven't even started yet.

October 4th - Intro post! I'd say introduce yourself but I'm pretty sure we all know each other so maybe write a little something about Franzen or this book or why you're doing this

October 11th - Luckily this first chapter break sort of works. Read up to the section titled The More He Thought About It, The Angrier He Got. Plus this title captures my feelings of trying to put this schedule together

October 18th - Here's where things get messy. So I was trying to do roughly 140 pages between each week. Except there is NOTHING, no chapter break, no section breaks, nothing, around this point. Because Franzen is a jerk. So, two options. We can go with more like 200 pages for this section and make it to the next section called The Generator which is on page 336 (in my copy anyway, which is the trade paperback from Picador).

If we think that will be too much Franzen for 1 week, at around page 300 there's a big text block that starts with "Some mysteries of her obsession, Sylvia said, were that she'd been raised as a Quaker..." so we could stop there. I have no idea if that is in the middle of some big important action sequence so if it is, sorry about that. And again, please speak up if anyone has any better ideas.

October 25th - Let's read up to the section called One Last Christmas. That looks like it will work with either Oct 18th section break we go with.

Nov 1st - FINISH HIM! So I realize we're no longer in October but it's ONE DAY later and I thought it better to finish in November than try to cram in the Franzen to just 3 weeks. This can also be our wrap up post for any final thoughts and perhaps plans about how we'll pretentiously work in some Franzen quotes at our next party.

Let's see how many times this readalong makes me feel like this

I'm guessing at least 6.

Corrections readalong: Wanna play?

I have had The Corrections sitting on my shelf for years now and it seems pretty clear there's no way I'm reading this unless I have some additional incentive. I made it part of a challenge one year and that didn't help. So this time around I'm thinking readalong. Because even if the book is not doing it for me I can at least bitch about it with a bunch of friends and GIFs.

So anyone want to play along? Yeaaaaah, you know you do. We can do the readalong in October. I haven't hosted one of these before, so I will do my best to actually figure out chapter breaks and whatever else I should be doing as host of a readalong. (So I guess step one will be "figure out what I'm supposed to do". This is going well already.) But LOOK, I started this sign up post and there's a Community marathon on, so I hope you all realize how serious I am about this. Or else please forgive this post if it's all over the place, but it's paintball episode number two (the Western one) so it's not like I can just ignore it. Please expect the same level of dedication in the readalong posts that you're getting now.

So if you want to play along, sign up below. And if you have any advice for me, I'm all ears (all eyes? Some of these idioms are very confusing in writing.)