The End of My Attempt at Participating in a Blog Event

Hello! Last weekend, I posted very excitedly about taking part in the Wicked Wildfire Read-A-Thon, since I thought that it would be cool to see how much I could read in a week while, at the same time, actually making use of this blog. I wouldn't say that my participation in the event was a complete failure, but at the same time, I didn't do very well, either. On Saturday and Sunday I read like crazy, doing one of the nifty challenges that My Shelf Confessions, the host blog, had posted, and then finishing two novels and a book of manga, but after that, I completely farted out on the whole thing. Still, three books in a weekend isn't awful, so here's what I thought of the books I read! I posted these reviews on Shelfari, too, but, due to the fact that I wrote most of these very late at night, have done some editing. As I'm sure you'll notice, though, I was fairly ambivalent towards the reading I did get done, which may have stopped me from going on with the read-a-thon with the enthusiasm I had on Saturday. Hopefully, however, I'll do better the next time that I participate in something like this!

The I.T. Girl
Fiona Pearse
I downloaded The I.T. Girl from Amazon on a whim, when it was free for a day, and can't say that it wasn't worth at least the effort that it took to download it. Some of the corporate intrigue was genuinely suspenseful, and Orla, the heroine, was a fairly likable character. I also really liked all of the tiny details and very British details of Orla's day to day life. For the most part, though, this book seemed a little dull. Orla's romance wasn't very interesting, and though I understand computers and coding, some of the play by play explanations of coding projects and bug searches got to be a bit much. CooperDaye, the fictional financial company that the book centers on, seemed to be a cartoonishly horrific company to work for, too, though Orla's problems there didn't render her unsympathetic.

While I didn't love The I.T. Girl, I'm not sorry that I read it. However, I don't think that it's going to have a long term home on my Kindle and, reflecting back on the novel, am not quite sure how I got through it.

Clover- Volume 4
Clamp
Since I've managed to drag out my reading Clover, which is a fairly light on text manga series, over a ridiculously long amount of time, I was really looking forward to reading this final volume and seeing how it all ended. However, I was a little disappointed to find out that this volume was a flashback, rather than the aftermath of Kazuhiko and Suu's story. The story in this volume, about the relationship between two brothers who are also Three Leaf Clovers (which I promise makes some sort of sense if you've read the rest of the comic) is well told and as pretty as ever, and, as a bonus, is interlaced with some incidental scenes between Kazuhiko and Oruha, as well as some of Suu's lamentations. I didn't really feel like this story had as much impact on the rest of the series as it should have, though, and wasn't entirely satisfied with this as an ending. As a whole, I did enjoy Clover, but this well-drawn and empty feeling story seemed to suffer from every problem that the series had in the space of one short book.

The Crystal Stopper
Maurice Leblanc
Even though I read the Arsene Lupin novels like crazy, considering they're entertaining and safely in the public domain, I think that the quality of them varies wildly from book to book. The Crystal Stopper, unfortunately, was not one of my favorites in the series. This may be in part because I read the entire book within a 24-hour time period, which I don't usually do. All of the complicated and contrived plot twists and problems started to run together, and it was a bit bothersome. Plus, I felt a bit like Clarisse, the romantic interest in this book, would have been okay with Lupin falling in a hole and never getting out if he'd managed to keep his promises to her before the accident occurred. Like the other novels in the series, however, The Crystal Stopper was never boring, and, as always, Arsene Lupin was both likable and vaguely reprehensible. Though I didn't love this book, reading it was a good way to waste a rainy Sunday.

If you're interested in reading The Crystal Stopper, too, it is available for free both at Amazon.com and Project Gutenberg.

Attempting to Take Part in a Read-A-Thon

Hello! I am awful at keeping up with this blog, though I haven't by any means stopped reading, so I've decided that it's time to take part in a blog event! It's called the Wicked Wildfire Read-A-Thon, and since it runs from June 7th to June 14th, I have already missed a day of it. If I can finish the book that I'm currently reading and one or two more, however, I don't think I'll have done too badly! There's a nifty info link here, to a post about in on the host blog, My Shelf Confessions, even though it looked a bit daunting at first glance.  So far, though, I've gotten to do virtual jigsaw puzzles as part of this whole thing, so obviously, it's not too serious or intimidating. Since this is just an intro post, I don't have all that much more to say, but hopefully, I remember that I'm participating in this and actually manage to get some reading done! Wish me luck, and have a nice day, too!

An Attempt at the 2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge

Hello! I haven't done too much with this blog yet, other than type into the wild spaces of the internet, but I thought that it might be fun to try some reading challenges for next year! I am not totally sure how to effectively find them, but I saw one on drifting drifting..., a blog kept by fellow cross stitcher Star, and figured that it would be as good a place to start as anywhere. The challenge, hosted by Gina at the nifty looking blog Book Dragon's Lair, is called the 2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge! In it, you read two or three books each from a relatively basic list of genres, depending on how ambitious you feel, and and then make sure that each book from those aforementioned genres fits in a different sub-genre. I'm not sure that I'll be able to categorize everything properly as I'm going, but it sounds like it could be fun, so I'm going to try it, and go for the three-book-per-genre level of the challenge, too! Plus, it starts today rather than on January 1st, so if I can figure out where The Mysteries of Udolpho, which I'm currently about a third of the way through, would be categorized, I have a decent head-start on the challenge.

If you'd like more information on the 2013 Sub-Genre Reading Challenge, you can find it in this post from Book Dragon's Lair. I'm really hoping to pass it, since it's only 15 books, so I wish everyone else participating good luck, too!  If I can find four more interesting challenges like this before the end of the month, I think that I may be more than set in terms of reading goals for next year.