I know you’re thinking to yourself, “Now are all of those exclamations in the title really necessary?” If you’ve ever changed from hosted to self-hosted, YOU WOULDN’T BE ASKING THAT QUESTION. Self-hosting is just as mind-numbingly frustrating as everyone says, as well as wonderfully freeing as everyone says.

I’m now permanently and for probably the rest of my life at http://heylady.net.

The old feed will not be pulling my new posts anymore, so please update your feed to THIS.

THIS IS THE FEED YOU WANT.

I’m nothing if not subtle.

ALSO! If you’re nice enough to link to me on your blogroll or some such thing, would you please change the link? Merci!

I’d seen such good reviews of Wake by Lisa McMann that I checked it out from the library as opposed to sticking with my resolution to not buy or borrow any more books until my ARC pile is completed. Alas, book diets are hard to keep.

When I originally started blogging, I was having nightmares, and I thought that blogging about them might be fun and amusing. I only blogged about my nightmares a few times, but I get them all the time. So how intrigued was I when I heard about this book, Wake, that was about a girl who was getting sucked into other people’s bad dreams?? Very intrigued! Oh, the potential!

But then I started reading, and the book was, well, choppy. Here’s an example from page 9:

A U-Haul truck pulls up next door. A man, a woman, and a girl Janie’s age (13 <– not in the book, but I thought it was pertinent to the quote) climb out and sink into the snow-covered driveway. Janie watches them from her bedroom window.

The girl is dark-haired and pretty.

Janie wonders if she’ll be snooty, like all the other girls who call Janie white trash at school. Maybe, since this new girl lives next to Janie on the wrong side of town, they’ll call her white trash, too.

But she’s really pretty.

Pretty enough to make a difference.

SEE! So the writing’s choppy, but Natasha said she thought that it worked for the narrator’s age and circumstances, which really got me thinking. Maybe there’s a purpose to this writing. So I checked the author’s blog, and her writing doesn’t seem to be choppy, so she obvs did this on purpose!

Sorry.

It still irritated me.

The story’s very simple: Janie gets sucked into other people’s dreams (which isn’t very convenient in math class, since she flops around like she’s spasming), and she watches the dream play out again and again, and even though she wants to help people, she appears to be helpless. Then she gets sucked into a really scary dream that freaks her out, because this guy turns into a monster and kills this other guy. EEK! All of a sudden voyeurism isn’t fun anymore.

I just think that the story could have been so much more. You know how when you bake something and it doesn’t turn out perfect? And other people love it and don’t notice the difference, but you know that your product could have been so much better? That’s how I feel with Wake. But perhaps the problem is with me, since I read this on the heels of The Hunger Games, which I loved so much that I wanted to have it’s babies, but I couldn’t because litcest (kind of like incest, but not) is illegal.

I’ll definitely be reading the sequel, Fade, so maybe the book did do what it set out to accomplish: it hooked me!

Rating: 84 out of 100

Check out the author’s website.

Buy the book at Powell’s, Amazon, or any other bookstore.

Other reviews:

Presenting Lenore

A Patchwork of Books

Maw Books Blog (and an Author interview)

Book Adorer

Karin’s Book Bytes

The Story Siren

There’s a shiny new book blog in town!

Book, Line, and Sinker

My friend, Curly Wurly Gurly, has a fantastic blog of the same name, where she talks about all sorts of random stuff, but some of my favorites are the post about F&F, “In the Car Super Star”, and that time she gave away a Coach purse, which I won, but has seemed to curse me for every other giveaway I’ve ever entered.

So she started a book blog as a place to put all her bookish posts. She’s already got some book reviews up, and you should check out this review of Here’s the Story  by Maureen McCormick, which I thought was particularly funny.

AND! Her rating system is bookmarks! How cute is THAT?! If only I could have been as creative.

All I’m saying is, she’s a fantastic writer, funny, interesting, and nice. If you like me, you’ll (almost definitely) like her. So you should go say hi, put her in your blogroll, and love her like I do.

Best post this week: A post about what kind of information you should have on your contact page, and why it’s important to state your reviewing policy, etc. I’d taken my page down because I didn’t want solicitations from authors or publishers anymore, but I’ve since changed my mind and reworked my policy.

Here’s a post about getting ARCs from an author’s point of view. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic!

I think a universal problem of book clubs is when do you stop accepting new members? Because book clubs can get too big. But this book club went ahead and built themselves a BAR. Yes, A BAR. The buy-yourself-a-drink-and-flirt-with-the-person-next-to-you kind of bar. I don’t think I could be more jealous of this book club if I tried.

Devourer of Books read America, America by Ethan Canin and says it’ll be a strong contender for her favorite book this month. It’s so funny, because she passed up this book numerous times, just like me. Guess I’ll need to be just like her and read the stinkin’ book.

This past Thursday on Twitter was query fail day, where agents and editors live-blogged via Twitter why they rejected the query letters they’d just read in an attempt to educate queriers. It was SO AWESOME. My favorite one? “My book is about a friendship based upon mutual vomiting practices in high school.” But then some people got their knickers in a twist, and Steph had some choice words to say to them.

Beth asked readers to pick the book that she MUST READ before the end of the year. People voted and you should go check it out because she’s still up for recommendations.

Chartroose just ordered a book called The Kindly Ones, and here’s the synopsis:

“The Kindly Ones,” the 983-page novel by Jonathan Littell that went on sale on Tuesday, is a fictionalized  memoir of a remorseless former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather. Oh, and it’s been translated from the French.”

How could you not want to read that shining example of lit-ra-ture?

My Friend Amy GOT TO WRITE A BOOK ENDORSEMENT!!! EEEEE!!! She talks about that, and book endorsements in general. But let’s go congratulate her, shall we?

Marta has some giveaways going on.

Shelly is giving away a copy of Everyone is Beautiful. But you have to hurry, because it ends tonight (Sunday) at midnight.

Carrie talks about her favorite books to read aloud. Great post to check out if you’re going on a road trip!

Have you ever wondered why someone named their blog what they did? The Bluestocking Guide: Reviews by a Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant Reader explains the meaning behind her name. Definitely check it out, it’s very cool and literary.

Care had a hilarious post where she talked to me…but she wasn’t really talking to me, it was all in her imagination. Hahaha!!

Did I miss anything particularly interesting or funny?

There’s a few things that I’ve seen or that have happened recently that I want to tell you about, but that don’t really warrant a whole post on their own. So this post should catch all the randomness that has been floating around in my head lately.

This was a conversation between me and my husband recently:

Me: I’m going to clean the shower before I take a shower this morning.

Dave: Why? Didn’t you just clean it?

Me: Well, yeah, I mean, I cleaned it two or three weeks ago. It definitely is time to clean it again.

Dave: The shower doesn’t need to be cleaned every two or three weeks, hon.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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A friend of mine showed me this picture. I found it on the Huffington Post, and they say it was taken eight days before she gave birth.