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Friday Reads Uncut

Ever since my friends got together for our very long delayed Christmas celebration I've been powering through Karen Marie Moning's Fever series. Basically our hot young heroine goes to Dublin to discover who killed her sister, only she finds out that fairies are real and on the verge of destroying our world. Definitely better than your average paranormal romance/urban fantasy. I generally don't read the genre because it's either too sleazy or too twilight-y. In this one the heroine is believable despite the fact that she's a 22-year-old blonde who's lived a charmed life right up until her sister's murder. She ends being surprisingly gritty and resilient and while there does end up being a lot of sex, it's not what you think. Definitely on the dark side, but worth the read. Right now I'm on #4 of a the 5 book series. Hopefully I'll finish it all this weekend because it's been impossible to focus on much other than reading these books.

I had to force myself to take a break from the Fever books so I could focus on something else for awhile, so I started reading Gigi Amateau's A Certain Strain of Peculiar during my down time and I'm enjoying it so far. I've been applying for so many teen librarian positions lately, but now that I don't sit next to another teen librarian at work, I've gotten out of my teen fiction groove. In this story 13-year-old Mary Harold is being bullied and figures the only way to stop it is to run away to Alabama to live with her Grandma Ayma. So far I'm really loving Mary Harold's voice. Amateau really knows how to make her sound like a teenager who doesn't quite fit in.

And in hold overs from previous Friday Reads Uncut, I am still working on my two Billie Holiday biographies (Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon by Donald Clarke and Lady Day's Diary by Ken Vale) and G. Kim Dority's Rethinking Information Work. Hopefully this next week will see me cleaning up this list and getting a few of these finished. Although a friend just lent me the next 3 Walking Dead books I need to read (10-12) and another friend lent me her Kindle so I could finish up the Moning series and read The Hunger Games (finally!) so we'll see.
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