Comfort Reading

My apologies for the radio silence, folks.

I don't want this to be the place where I spill all my troubles, so I won't go into it, but things have been, for lack of a better word, difficult lately. I just haven't been able to make myself sit down and write any reviews. I've been doing what any good raised-by-baptists girl would do. I've been making comfort food. Nothing like mac'n cheese or mashed potatoes or mini chocolate nanner muffins to make bad times better. This baptist upbringing has also instilled in me the need to provide a comfort casserole or lasagna to anyone remotely in crisis.

My kitchen's been busy.

But I've also been reading. In recent weeks, I've read some great books (Dark Parties, Rotters, Texas Gothic), and I'm going to try to make myself sit down and talk about them with you all soon. What's really been taking up my time, though, is the Song of Ice and Fire series (many thanks to The Lost Entwife whose non-spoilery reviews pushed me over the edge into Must Read Now). I've not been able to put them down. Part of this is because these books are great and end with just enough left unresolved that I've just HAD to rush into the next 1000+ page installment. The bigger part, I think, is that books like A Game of Thrones et al. are my reading comfort food. The fantasy part is, unsurprisingly, just the kind of thing to make me feel better, but the combination of fantasy with a medieval or feudal setting just does something for me. I blame the books leftover from my father's Arthurian fantasy phase that littered my childhood. I have one more Ice and Fire book in my possession, and there is another that I can buy after that. But I don't feel the need to read them anymore. I just want to. Which means they worked.

I'll be back to my normal book-reviewing self soon, I hope, but in the meantime, what's your favorite comfort reading?


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Happy National Library Week!

Is your library doing anything exciting to celebrate?

My public library definitely is, and we're even hosting a few events here at work (which hopefully won't be thwarted by pre-Easter, end of the year assignments).

Even if your library isn't having or is unable to have any special NLW programming this week, there are other ways to celebrate such as by writing a twaiku or by sharing the YA love with complete strangers (I know that many of you do this a lot of the time anyway, but click through for the readergirlz annual Teen Book Drop info and bookplate).

However you choose to celebrate, this is a great week to do something bookish!

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Book Envy and the TBR hierarchy

I was at the library the other day to pick up some holds (more 2011 award winners!), and I got distracted by shiny things in Recent Fiction. The ones I was most attracted to? Under the Poppy and Instruments of Darkness. I was so tempted to check them out.

Thanks for sharing, you're thinking, or maybe even, why are you telling us about adult books you're pining for on your YA lit blog. Because, well, I already own both of these books.

But I don't get to read them yet.

There is a definite hierarchy in my TBR pile. ARCs are usually first, in order of publication date (Instruments of Darkness falls into this category), but YA ARCs have priority. After that is library books, in order of due date and factoring in the likelihood of being able to renew (example, Please Ignore Vera Dietz will get read before Guardian of the Dead even though the latter is due first because I know I won't be able to renew Vera - placing fake holds with the girlfriend's library card (and then removing them, I promise!) helps work out these distinctions). YA books, again, get priority over adult. Middle grade books are usually even higher up on the list, since I read less of them but I love Tween Tuesday.

After all of these books with time lines attached, come the poor books that I've actually bought and paid for. The titles that I've snagged on sale or with coupons. Books I've picked up from library book sales. And even the wonderful books whose pub dates I've put in my calendar because I just HAD to HAVE them the day they came out (I'm looking at you Bright Young Things, Leviathan, Beautiful Creatures...).  

No wonder I tend to fail at the "read my own books" types of challenges. My books all sit collecting dust further down in my TBR pile while the books at the top rotate through based on the mail and my own (lack of) self-control at the library.

Of course I want to check out books I own from the library. Then I'd be allowed to read them! Which is, of course, a load of crap. Why should the books that I shell out money for never be read? Why do I still spend hundreds of dollars a year on books that I don't allow myself to read? Because I've set myself up with a list of personal blogger obligations.

My blogger responsibilities have to do with both the kind of books I review (my adult TBR pile suffers even more than my YA TBR pile, if that's possible), and what or who is in them. I've started to let challenges dictate rather than guide my reading habits. I'm also distracted by the new and the shiny. Many of the books I own are so last year...or even older. But I still want to read them.

All this to say that I'm going to try to pull from my own shelves and piles rather than placing holds at the library on or even rushing out to buy the hot new thing. I'm also going to give myself permission to read a bit more adult literature, even if it means I won't always have something to review here (it also means I'll probably be reviewing more crossover titles). Hopefully I'll be able to shed some light on a few titles that you've forgotten about or missed in the last few years. 

How about you? I know I'm a bit OCD about it, but I hope I'm not alone in creating a set of "rules" for the order in which I read books. Also, any books you're still dying to read languishing in your TBR pile?

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Elton John

I just finished Will Grayson, Will Grayson (it's awesome! review to come!) which features the production "Tiny Dancer: The Tiny Cooper Story." Now I'm moving on to Hold Me Closer, Necromancer.

It's like an Elton John Festival in my head right now, with that one song on repeat. And I just have to share it with you. :)





To Sharon and Emy, who I had the supreme pleasure of working with at the Starbucks by Golden Gate Park during the days leading up to San Francisco Pride (twice!): Elton John festivals, even the ones in my head, aren't nearly as fun/painful without you!

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

ALA Youth Media Awards

Starting with my review of Hereville yesterday, I'm going to try to read and review all of the Youth Media Award winners and honor books that I can get my hands on. I have enough titles currently in my apartment to last me another couple of weeks including the informational book award winner, Janis Joplin: Rise Up Singing, and the I-know-it's-awesome-already Will Grayson Will Grayson.

I also have a fair amount on hold at the library, but those might not get read and reviewed for quite a while as everyone seems to be in line for the same winners.

And, of course, I've already reviewed the Schneider Family Book Award winner, Five Flavors of Dumb.

Congratulations to all the winner and honor books!

Links to Amazon.com may be affiliate links for the Amazon Associates program. If you buy something through this link, I may receive a referral fee.

Happy New Year

I know I'm a little late, but I have a good reason! Upon returning to work after Christmas break, I was pulled into the boss's office and given a (possibly temporary, but still awesome) promotion! I'm now working full-time, which is a huge relief and will keep me from needing a second part-time gig. But I'm also dealing with a kind of steep learning curve in a few areas, in addition to plain not knowing where things are or what I'm supposed to be doing. It's been an exciting but kind of stressful first week back.

Still, I'm sorry to have neglected things here (and during the comment challenge to boot!). I'll be back to regularly blogging (and hopefully commenting!) with this week's Tween Tuesday post.

Thanks for sticking around, and I hope your year's are starting on an upswing as well!

I'm baaack

I didn’t get to as many of the “grown-up” books as I wanted to during my time away. But that’s okay, because I’ve been reading library books!

I realized during my break that lately I’ve been reading books that I feel obligated to read rather than books I want to read. Sometimes these two categories overlap, such as with Extraordinary, Penny Dreadful, The Mockingbirds, Nightshade City, and The Kneebone Boy, just to name a few. But basically, I’ve been reading a bunch of ARCs. Don’t get me wrong, I love ARCs and I’m grateful for all the ARCs and review copies that come my way. But since ALA, where I picked up BAGS of ARCs and passed out my card to more publishers and publicists than I can remember, I feel like I’ve been drowning in them.

And I don’t even have that many.

But I’ve still been feeling very burnt out on this whole reading boatloads of YA/MG books and writing reviews of them. By giving myself a break from the pile of books I feel like I need to read, I realized that I do still really want to read YA/MG books and I still have a lot to say about them. I just want to pick what I read and when I’m going to read it! So, from a personal standpoint, I’m going to be more particular about what titles I accept for review, even if that means I’m removed from a few people’s pub lists. I’m tired of feeling bogged down by my blog.

From a more “professional,” or at least "blog goals" standpoint, I’m going to be more picky about what I review because I feel like I’ve moved away from what I wanted to do with my blog in the first place, that is to highlight YA/MG books featuring or written by POC and/or positively portraying members of the LGBTQ community. Looking over what I’ve reviewed since ALA, you wouldn’t know that’s supposed to be my focus. Brought to my attention by MissAttitude and further explained by Zetta and the CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center), the publishing statistics for books written by and/or about POC are abysmally low. According to the CCBC numbers, if you add the number of books written by POC to the number of books written about POC (and in reality there is most likely overlap with those numbers), 18% of books for young people are written by or about POC. If the pile o’books I picked up at ALA is any kind of a representative sample, that statistic is a bit high. In the last three months I've read and reviewed a total of three books where the main character is not white, and only one book that positively portrays members of the LGBTQ community (something that is not tracked by the CCBC). It makes me sad.

But, as the title of this post says, I'm back. Back from my blog break and back from a stint of reading what is handed to me rather than what is calling to me from the library or my TBR pile.

Happy Halloween

 (Me and my bestie circa 1999)

Happy Halloween Everyone!

I know it's tomorrow, but the kids in my neighborhood are making the rounds tonight.

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. Not only do you get to dress up in some amazing outfit that you'd never be able to wear otherwise, but Halloween means it's only a week until my birthday!

In honor of my anticipated post-Halloween candy coma and my birthday, I'm taking a little break. I'm going to spend the next two weeks hitting all the post-Halloween candy sales so I have something to munch while reading The Rebels of Ireland (so I can finally mail it to my dad as promised months ago), Russell Brand's memoir, and maybe even the last third of War and Peace. It's okay, I laughed a little at that last one too.


You should spend the next two weeks doing the following:

• NOT forgetting about The Mockingbirds and Five Flavors of Dumb (I'll review it when I get back) which come out on the 2nd and 11th, respectively,
• VOTING, if you're in the States and of age, of course,
• and trying to beat me to the sales of leftover candy!

See you all in a couple weeks!

Happy Mockingjay Day!

Hopefully I am, right at this minute, marching into Barnes and Noble to claim my copy of Mockingjay. 

Notification phone call be damned.

Or I'm sleeping through my alarm.

Either way, my Tween Tuesday post is going to be a bit late.

Notes on PK month

I'm going to take this opportunity to do a little housecleaning, starting with a warning:

Even if you've scheduled a bunch of posts in advance, you shouldn't just leave your blog alone for weeks at a time assuming that everything is going along as planned.

I didn't mean to leave a week and a half post-less! I also didn't mean to post almost a month's worth of PK book reviews with no explanations! So here we go, the post that I thought was scheduled for July 1st and an (almost) wrap-up all in one:


Earlier this summer, I made an epic library trip, the kind where you pick up a million holds AND a pile of stuff off the displays as well. When I got home and was organizing my loot into piles, I realized that I'd managed to pick up 3 very different books featuring PKs (Pastor or Preacher's Kids). Apparently even though actual PKs might be a very small part of the YA population, books about them aren't all that rare. Having a main character (or really important secondary character) whose family life revolves around the church can make for an easy entry into discussing religion without always moving into the realm of Christian fiction or the "problem" novel. After reading The Full Spectrum, a book of short autobiographical pieces by queer youth in which religion kept coming up as a central theme, I was interested in looking at how religion is treated in fiction written by adults for teenagers. Looking for books about PKs seemed like a good way to do that. Plus, July was coming up. My mom's birthday is in July, and she's a PK.

So July will be [has been] PK month here at lucy was robbed. I think I've managed to find a good range of books featuring PKs, including a paranormal romance and a dystopian novel as well as a slew of realistic fiction works. My reviews of these books [have and] will look more closely at the way that religion is presented in relation to the subject matter of the book as well as how the main characters' views on religion change throughout the course of the story. Religion can be such a touchy subject. By the time readers are teenagers, most of them know not to discuss it in mixed company (no politics or religion, right?), but that doesn't mean that they don't have questions about and struggles with the religion in which they've been raised or the religion they may be adopting. YA novels can be a great tool to open up discussion about religion or to just let teen readers know that they are not the only ones dealing with these issues. I know that I am looking forward to dissecting these books a little bit, and I hope you [have] enjoy[ed] looking through these books with me!

And Happy Birthday Mom! :)

Here is the list of books that I have reviewed for PK month:
Saving Maddie by Varian Johnson
The Dark Divine by Bree Despain
Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr
Simply Divine by Jacquelin Thomas
Nothing Pink by Mark Hardy
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
Gringolandia by Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Bad Faith by Gillian Philip

I realize that this list has all Christian protagonists (or they at least have Christian parents). I did make an effort to find books about the PK equivalent in other religions, but was unsuccessful. That doesn't mean that books like Does My Head Look Big in This by Randa Abdel-Fattah are not on-deck to be read/reviewed in the near future; they just didn't fit for PK month.

Thanks for sticking around, folks, and sorry for the week plus of silence!

ALA Wrap-Up

...it's so good to be home where I can sit down!

I managed to get a last minute Exhibits Only pass and a spot on a bus down to DC with TCLC, a consortia to which my library belongs. So with no preparation at all, I flitted down to ALA for a couple of days!

The girlfriend convinced me to get a car (thank you PhillyCarShare, you make my life possible!) and drive down on Sunday, as the TCLC bus was only good for Monday. I'm so glad she did! I'm also eternally grateful that she came with me and acted as my PA, passing out my card to publishers, taking pictures, carrying stuff, and, most importantly, reading me the list of author signings on the drive down so we could have a plan of attack.

This allowed us to show up at the Random House Pavilion (seriously, "booth" does no begin to describe their set-up) in plenty of time to go swimfan on Libba Bray. Luckily she's into the crazy and played along:

Look at me. I'm totally in her personal space. Libba, if you somehow magically happen to read this, I'm sorry. BUT I LOVE YOU!

The rest of Sunday went by in a blur or schmoozing and carrying around heavy things, though I do remember needing to explain to Lane Smith why I needed to him to make a book out to "Lawral's Dad."

Monday I was a bit nicer on my wallet and, having read the author list in advance, brought books from home for people to sign. This is key, people. Because of my lack of preparation the first day, there are now multiple copies of Going Bovine and A Great and Terrible Beauty in my house.

Julie Anne Peters was awesome and sweet. She even laughed off my stalker joke when I showed up at two of her signings in one day.

And Nick Burd was also a doll. We chatted about queer bookstores and he "stole" the Giovanni's Room bookmark that fell out of my book.

All in all, I had a great conference! Hopefully next year I'll actually get to go for the whole weekend and/or to some sessions. :)

Mini-Break

I try not to let "real" life affect this blog, but sometimes real life is very insistent that it have all of my attention.

A couple of weeks ago the girlfriend had emergency surgery. She's fine now and the procedure was so non-invasive that she was even sent home the next day, but it was still out of nowhere and there were some pretty scary days leading up to it. The whole thing was very emotionally draining for me, not to mention that she never needs to go to the ER in the daytime. She always manages to have her ER visits in the evening, making them last into the wee hours of the morning. Since I work at a Catholic college and she is my girlfriend, not my boyfriend, I can't miss work after these visits because according to HR, she's not my family. That is a whole other issue for a whole other post, but here's the short version:

Books with positive LGTBQ portrayals are vitally important to queer kids who read them and are surrounded by less than accepting peers and adults; we all know this. BUT they are also very important for the straight kids who read them because they normalize the queer experience, take away the ick factor, and make queer people more like you and me (the collective you and me, clearly). We want this because these kids may later be in positions to make decisions affecting queer folks on the large scale or even for the 3 whole people they supervise, one of whom might be queer. Love the sinner, hate the sin doesn't go all that far when you need the day off to take care of your post-surgery partner.

Well, that didn't end up all that short, but that's okay because it brought me to my next point. Out-patient surgery really is great for the patient. Convalescing at home is more comfortable and relaxing. You can sleep in your own bed, watch your favorite movies on repeat, pet the cat, etc. But it's a lot of work for those taking care of the patient. Even with the help of friends, who came over to "babysit" the girlfriend while I was at work and did secret nice things like clean the kitty litter, do all the dishes, or cook enough food for the rest of the week, it's been a rough couple of weeks. Now that the girlfriend is pretty much back to normal, I can catch up on things, like my reviews! Except that I don't want to. I want to sleep, watch movies, pet the cat, etc.

I've been trying to avoid this, but now that I've run out of my reserve of finished reviews, I guess it's time. I'm taking a little break so that I can catch up on things, blog and not, without the added time-pressure. But I'll be back and raring to go for the 48 Hour Book Challenge next weekend! I'm probably going to be using my allotted networking time to catch up on reading blogs more than writing reviews, so get ready for comments on some older posts. See you all in a week.

 - Lawral

"A Manifesto of Imaginative Literature" - Justin Allen

Justin Allen, author of a YA fantasy/Western with characters that hail from many backgrounds that have their own sections in bookstores, has written an essay about bookshelving, genres, and what all of that means. Here's the start:

For the Love of Pete, Don’t Mix Your Genres;

Or… The New York Times Book Review Hates YOU, but I Don’t;

Or… Why Where Your Book Gets Shelved Determines Your Intelligence,

Work-Ethic and Value to Society

That’s a longish title I’ll admit, and while I generally don’t go in for such larded vessels, in this case I’m willing to make an exception.

Monstrous though it may seem (and most assuredly is), the above title sums up pretty much everything I have to say on the subjects of writing and publishing. The first line ought to be read as a word of warning to struggling writers. The second explains - in as much as an explanation of the unintelligible is even possible - why the publishing industry behaves as it does. And the third highlights our common enemy, which turns out to be ourselves.


Really - if I must say so myself - that title is a wonder of economy, precision and restraint. But maybe you’d like me to elaborate? Normally I’d refuse - principally on the grounds that my arguments tend to be weakened by exploration - but as I have been contracted to provide a minimum of fifteen minutes of reading diversion, I will betray myself and attempt to explain…

To read the rest, go to SF Signal:
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/03/part-1-a-manifesto-of-imaginative-literature/

it's here!!!

The final installment in The Luxe series is finally here! I'm trying to be really good and read off of my challenge lists (Leviathan and ArchEnemy are hidden away in their Barnes and Noble bags so I won't be tempted), but there is no way that I'm not tearing into Splendor on the bus ride home from buying it!

See my review of Envy here.

Never too busy for a little bit o' Riordan!

This whole working 6 days a week business is really cutting into my blog writing and blog reading time. (The extra commuting, however, is doing great things for my book reading time). That would explain how I missed this little bit of news from MotherReader:

The author of The Lightning Thief gave a book talk (read: hosted a crowded, screaming rally) with people lining up long before he was scheduled to start. (Kate DiCamillo thought they were her fans). There were crowds. There was rain. And after hours of waiting in line, these people were ready for some flippin’ Book Talks! And Rick delivered.

Riordan was brought to the top by the Percy Jackson series. He plans to write a story about the next generation of Half-Blood campers. He’s also gonna milk this “gods” thing as much as he can, because some stories about the Egyptian deities are coming out soon. From the tiny excerpt he read, it’s going to keep the same humorous style and adventure as the Percy books, but with a whole new setting. They both sound like definite must-reads.

I really wish I could have concentrated more, but I had to stand during his talk — which I had already been doing for the past hour — and I was suffocating because of all the breathing people in the tent.

This was written by TeenReader, as you can probably guess from that last paragraph. :)

But more Camp Half-Blood? More Riordan comedy involving other deities? I could not be more excited. A quick search on Amazon shows that the first Egypt book should come out in May of next year. Can I wait that long? Maybe.

And just in case you missed them before, here are my thoughts on the Percy Jackson series by Riordan:
Book 1: The Lightning Thief
Book 2: The Sea of Monsters
Book 3: The Titan's Curse
Book 4: The Battle of the Labyrinth
Book 5: The Last Olympian