How do you chose books?

So, I've been listening to Stephen King's The Gunslinger in my car this week. I read it years and years ago. I read through the fourth in the series when I was in high school. I think before I was even 16, which is when I started at the library.

What I was thinking today was that this book is not like anything that I every can imagine picking for myself. How did I chose this book all of those years ago, before I had met anyone who had read the series? I imagine that I went into the used book store and pulled it off the shelf because it didn't sound like the usual SK book.

Still, how do you pick a book? I have my list. I started my list during my senior English class. I took a list of suggested reading for a book report and wrote it down. I added books to it at work because I realized that I couldn't check out every book that sounded good. Then I found lists online and added them. Best modern literature. YA's dealing with tough stuff. Now I read reviews constantly for work and listen to NPR. I will never run out of books to read. Then there are the random ones I see at work. One of my next books is called Drizzle and I picked it because the cover was wonderfully bright and pretty. Then there are those authors who I usually feel are just going to be good: Nick Hornby, Francesca Lia Block, Stephen King, etc.

How do you pick books?

Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey

I can't help it. I love personal finance books. There's a reason I love them, though. They make me feel strong, motivated, and inspired. Ramsey is really good at this. While reading his books, I feel like I can take on the world and really accomplish my dreams.

I read Total Money Makeover about a year and a half ago and I got a similar boost from that. After reading, I built up an emergency fund and paid off my car a year early. However, I then bought a house. That is not part of the plan. After my offer was accepted on the house one of my cats was hit by a car and I had to pay tons of vet bills. Then I sunk $1700 into my car. Then I put a new roof on my house. Then I got to fix my car again after an accident.

This is life. Dave doesn't pretend that things like this don't happen. He acknowledges that not everything is your fault. Even better, he is constantly encouraging and annoyingly challenging. At the end of this book he asks, "Are you a man or a mouse? A woman or a wimp?" and my first thought was, "Well, I'm not a wimp!" I am excited to get started again, to get things under control. That is what Dave does. He gives you a simple plan and a reason for each step. If you're like me, you aren't going to work hard for anything that you don't understand. This is all very basic advice but sometimes we need to hear it.

My one warning here is that this book seems a bit more religious than I remember TMM being. It wasn't off-putting but because both books share basically the same information, that may be the deciding factor in which one you read.

Twelfth Grade KIlls by Heather Brewer

One problem with having a giant stack of books to read, most of them library books, is that it took me a shamefully long time to get here. I actually don't know how long it's been since I read the previous book in this series which made getting back into it a challenge. Eleventh Grade Burns apparently was a cliff hanger. I was a bit discombobulated when I started this one but I caught back on soon enough.

If you haven't read the previous books, stop reading now.

The start of this book is marked by the return of Vlad's long "dead" father, Tomas. Vlad thinks he is going crazy. His father died in a fire years before. Why would he see him now? He spends some time searching for his father and thinking he is crazy before he finds him. Now, things seem like they should be right.

But they aren't.

Vampires keep dying and Vlad keeps finding evidence that it may be Otis's doing. His trial is coming up and, if that weren't bad enough, if Joss doesn't slay him the Slayer Society will cleanse the town. Snow is now attending Bathory High, filling Vlad with guilt and confusion, and Eddie Poe is determined to become a vampire.

Needless to say, with so much going on every chapter is action packed. I read this one quickly, sometimes accidentally getting sucked into chapters at a time when I only meant to read one or two. I think that this was a fitting end to the series.

Passing Strange by Daniel Waters

If I had to pick which book out of this series was my favorite, this would be it. Hands down. Passing Strange is told mostly from Karen's point of view and mostly in first person. Mixed in are chapters from Pete's and Tak's point of view. They really added to the story but Karen is my favorite character from the series.

Karen has stayed above the lake where her dead friends are hiding. New laws have made it dangerous for her but she is "passing," pretending to be alive. She works at the mall and even takes her dad's car for a spin once in a while. When Pete walks into the store she's working at and doesn't seem to recognize her, she sees her chance to get some information. What follows is a dangerous game where she must get close to someone without letting them know she's a zombie. On top of this, weird things are happening. She's learning that she can heal.

This was a great read. It was exciting and dangerous and intriguing. I loved every minute of it and there were a number of times that were so exciting that I couldn't believe there was more to the book. Karen has issues and seeing her work them out felt really good. She became a friend, something that never happened with Pheobe as the main character in Generation Dead.

Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur by Francesca Lia Block

This was actually a pretty cute book but it's more like the kind of book you play around with than the kind you read. Like when you get an astrology book and you only read about your sign and your boyfriend's sign and whether or not you are compatible.

Block uses mythology to divide people into types. For instance, my boyfriend was nearly full on a merman. I fell somewhere between a banshee and an urban elf. We had a lot of fun reading about the types and figuring out what we were.

I don't know how useful it is but this book was pretty entertaining. Maybe someone single would find it helpful.

The Pretty Dead by Francesca Lia Block

I continue on my quest to read all of Francesca Lia Block's books.

I don't really know what to say about this one. It was a quick read and it was alright but I don't know that I really liked it. Part of that, I think, is because it is a young adult vampire book, which I have avoided like the plague. Still, I was engrossed in it and read it in one day.

Charlotte is a vampire. She is 17 and lives in a huge house full of pretty things. She is flawlessly beautiful. She has money. She has brains. But she is horribly lonely.

Then she meets Emily in her English class. She thinks that Em is beautiful and innocent and she wants to give her everything. She loves her. She dresses her up and gives her wine and takes her clubbing. Always underneath the surface is the knowledge that Em will die and she will be alone again. Em's boyfriend, Jared, makes a third in their group. Char and Jared sneak glances at one another but always there is Em.

Then Em dies. Charlotte seeks out Jared and together they begin to learn about one another. He knows her secret and she tells him of her past: The twin brother she lost and William, the vampire that made her, and all of their travels together. When William appears again, she can't help but suspect that something sinister is afoot. And she is right.

This seems a bit different from other vampire novels but also a little too similar. I don't know that I would read it again or suggest it to anyone but it was entertaining for today.

Slam by Nick Hornby

I love Nick Hornby. He never fails to make me laugh out loud like a mad woman. All of his characters just get to me and I find myself loving them even if they aren't doing the smartest or most decent things.

Sam's mother had him when she was 16 and he has planned on a different life than that. When a teacher takes him aside and suggests that he study design in college, he is excited to finally have an idea of what he wants to do. Him and his mother are close and part of that seems to be because of their closeness in age. At 15, his life consists mostly of school and skating and talking to his poster of Tony Hawk, which talks back mostly in quotes from his book.

Then Sam's mother introduces him to Alicia at a party and he thinks he's fallen in love. It's first love, young love. They spend as much time as possible together and they have sex. Lots of it. But after one little mistake, Sam finds himself in the same position his mother and father were in. At 16, Sam is going to be a dad and his mother is going to be a grandmother at 32.

The twist comes when he gets mad at his Tony Hawk poster while being a bit of a turd. He goes to sleep in his bed and wakes up... not in his bed. He wakes up a year in the future and stumbles through the day, not sure what is going on except that his lives with Alicia, has a baby named Roof, and goes to college. When he goes to bed at night, he wakes up back in his own time.

This is one of those books that is both hilarious and uncomfortable. At first I was confused by this "whizzing" into the future, as Sam calls it, but by the end of the book it all makes sense. I laughed out loud a lot, a couple of times in public. It's a story we've all heard before from a different point of view with a different twist. This is a wonderful first YA from one of my favorite authors that is definitely worth the read.