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I enjoy historical fiction, and this book does not disappoint in that regard. Vivid descriptions of Renaissance Italy, historical figures like Leonardo Da Vinci, and a gripping hook – a main character who has an unnaturally long lifespan.

The beginning of the book caught my attention pretty quickly – the author did a great job introducing the main character, Luca Bastardo. He's a very likeable character as well, so the need to see what happens to him, and how he handles himself in the situations that arise, kept my attention through what I thought was a disappointing middle section of the book. But the climax and conclusion came full-swing, so the book didn't disappoint. I read it in a weekend and enjoyed myself.

This book, as are all Krakauer's books, is very well-written and very engrossing. The story of Christopher McCandless is one of an idealistic young twentysomething who leaves his life behind after graduating from college to become Alexander Supertramp, a wandering nomad on his way to Alaska for a great adventure.

Except he was stupid. Now, Krakauer makes a huge deal about how smart, how intellectual McCandless was. How big of a reader he was. How animated, how intelligent, how engaging he was. He touched a lot of lives on his adventures across America; he made friends.

But he didn't get it. The boy repeatedly picked up and left, leaving people and places behind without much of a care in the world as to what his departure meant to those he was leaving; what his absence meant to his ever-worrying family; what his not being there meant to the sister that he supposedly cared so deeply for, but didn't bother contacting even once during his travels. If anything he was naive and selfish, and blind to the effect he had on others, willfully or not.

But what gets me about this book is how determined Krakauer is to compare himself to McCandless. He devotes a few chapters to creating parallels to himself and McCandless, insisting that he was that same headstrong boy in his twenties. But he missed out on one big, huge detail: he survived his twenties, and he did it because he knew what he was doing. He took maps. He took gear. He didn't just look at a vast, open wilderness and start walking. He planned.

McCandless didn't, and it got him killed. It's said repeatedly, in the book, in the news articles, and in the movie – had McCandless simply taken a map with him, he'd have known about nearby cabins. He'd have known about a river crossing. He'd have known he wasn't nearly as far into the wilderness as he'd come to believe he was. He'd likely have survived the entire ordeal. And yet.

The book itself is fantastic. It's engrossing, it's well-written, and it gives you a pretty damn good look into McCandless's short life. It certainly tries to make him into a hero, an American rambling man – but for me it fell short in that regard, trying to make McCandless out to be a whale when really, he was simply a fish.

This picked up right where book 1 left off and hit the ground running. The characters got so much more complex and delicious in this installment of the series, and the events of this book are exciting and intriguing. I can't wait to see where this goes.

My roommate read this before me, and when she handed it to me she said, “After you read this, I want to know who your favorite character is.” Hers was the king; mine was the fool – and when we handed it to a friend, hers was the queen. Each of us chose a different character, though all three of us tend to have similar tastes. Many interesting discussions were had once we'd all read it!

The author chose to set this novel in medieval Wales, thus giving all her characters names that made discussing them afterwards even more hilarious (I'm pretty sure we each had different ways of pronouncing each name). I wasn't struck by any glaring problems with the setting or style; the book was an easy read stylistically, and for that I commend the author.

There was a point near the end of the book where the plot twists came to a head and it became clear to me: this will not end well. And boy, did Galland deliver. It was definitely a thrill to read!

I loved this book! I found myself harboring pretty strong feelings about each and every one of the main characters (though if they were kind feelings is not quite so certain), and I was definitely wrapped up in the story. Bradley does a wonderful job writing the Arthurian legend from a new angle – the woman's angle. Never before had I seen this story the way it's presented by Bradley. Women are in power, women are strong and willful and people listen to them... until Christianity comes through and patriarchal reasoning becomes the way of the land, pushing the more feminine pagan ways into the past (and further into the mist, becoming harder and harder to reach).

It's long and it's involving, but it is worth it in every regard. There are characters you come to love, and characters you come to hate – I personally came to loathe Gwenhwyfar, and love Morgaine. I will definitely be rereading this.

I have to give Dan Brown credit – he wrote a quick read.

That's all I will give him credit for.

The foreshadowing in this book is clunky at best; Dan Brown seems to think himself clever and it shows in his writing. I could feel the “nudge nudge, wink wink!” feeling every time something came up that was clearly meant to hint at things to come.

This book also has the uncanny ability to make certain types of people forget that it's fiction – Dan Brown is a wordsmith, for sure, because how else would he so easily be able to convince such a large amount of people that the tale he has haphazardly woven is fact?

Not only did I come out of this book underwhelmed; I actually felt a bit dirty after finishing it. Dan Brown's like a sleazy car salesman of modern popular fiction.

DNF.

The premise, first of all, is a real life nightmare. If I woke up deep into my career one day to realize I was two courses short of graduating with the degree I thought I had already earned I'd probably die on the spot.

But I couldn't get past the incredibly unbelievable “the plot demands this” scenario in which somehow this YEARS-out-of-college woman MOVES IN ON CAMPUS to do her two remaining courses?? With a roommate? Like the COST ALONE, never mind how intensely frustrating it would be to move into dorms for literally half a year. Absolutely not. I can't.

Many people name Holden Caulfield when they discuss their favorite Salinger character, and likewise Catcher in the Rye when discussing their favorite Salinger book.

I'm inclined to say Zooey Glass and Franny & Zooey, myself.

This was the first Salinger book I'd picked up in years – after having a less-than-pleasant experience with Catcher in the Rye in high school (there's nothing quite like a terrible lit teacher to thoroughly decimate any enthusiasm for a great book). I'm glad I picked it up. I devoured this book. I adored this book. I ate this book up like it was the only book left on the planet and I slowed down near the end because I didn't want it to end. When I finished it I started over and read it again.

This book is brilliant. I'd be willing to bet that even people who consider Salinger one of their least favorite authors would like this book.

If you're going to pick up something by Dan Brown – I don't think I'd recommend it, but if you really must – pick this up and not The Da Vinci Code. Aside from BEGGING you to suspend disbelief at and around the climax of this novel, this is the better of the two European Adventures with Robert Langdon books.

Salinger's Nine Stories were a little hit-or-miss for me; I absolutely loved “Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esme” but a few of the others fell flat for me. All in all, though, the book is an incredible read. I couldn't put it down.

Paige again! This one didn't quite get me the same way the first three novels in the series did, but it was still a great read. I adore Paige and Lucas, as well as Savannah – but the plot of this one was a little less exciting than the others have been, for some reason.

All in all I still enjoyed it greatly, and devoured it once I got my hands on it. Armstrong definitely knows how to keep my attention!

This book has a heaping dose of unapologetic lady rage in it but it's also poorly paced and on a few occasions the author is unnecessarily vague for reasons that don't seem to pay off. I found the ending a little disappointing, but the unapologetic lady rage saved it from being a total loss.

It was a really quick read, I'll give it that.

If I could, I think this review would be a 3.5-4ish, and not a full four stars, but I wouldn't knock it down to three, so four it is. Richard Mayhew himself isn't terribly memorable – it's the characters he becomes surrounded by, purely by chance. Neverwhere is kind of a warped Alice style story, in that Mayhew goes from regular old London to the crazy fantasy London Below, where angels and demons and women named after doorways take him on an adventure he never could have dreamed in a million years.

Gaiman's got a great style, and a wicked sense of humor, so all in all I had a great time reading this novel, and I'd definitely loan it to a friend (so long as they promised to give it back when they were done).

I was surprised at the age of this book, as it's lasted this long and still remains wildly relevant to what's going on in the world today. The issue of women's rights is still a very big debate, and it was more than a little chilling to read this book, knowing that if things really do go south, this isn't an entirely unbelievable situation.

I thought that perhaps the epilogue was too much – I liked the way it ended without it – but it doesn't diminish the book by any means. Definitely worth a re-read!

The prose isn't just purple, it's that jewel-toned oversaturated royal purple you only find in satins and velvets. I cannot read a whole novel of this. That and the amount of “telling, not showing” infodump dialogue in the pages that I did attempt to read told me this book is not for me.

Jodi Picoult definitely knows how to manipulate emotions. When I picked this book up, I was immediately dragged into the storyline by the plot devices Picoult chose – terminal illnesses, family dynamics, legal proceedings – but as I read it became increasingly clear to me that Picoult chose these things specifically because she knew they'd keep people reading. It was manipulative! I didn't care about these characters because she wrote them well, I cared about them because you're supposed to care when a kid has cancer. If you don't care, you're heartless.

So it wasn't Picoult's writing that did it, because she certainly isn't the best writer in the world – sure, she knows how to zing you with a heartwrenching one-liner, and she knows how to place the cliches and “meaningful” statements at the ends of chapters and paragraphs to really get the tearjerking hook into you – but it's all manipulation, and it's all pretty cheap. Once I realized what I was reading I almost felt dirty, like I'd been tricked.

And one other quibble I have with this book – changing fonts between narrators is jarring. Your eyes get used to reading in arial and the next chapter's in times new roman? That's not cool. I had to put the book down and take a break between each chapter because of it. I didn't like that at all.

I'm a bit of an Easy Company junkie, and I've come to take quite a liking to the stories of Bill Guarnere in particular (the man has a way with words!) so a whole book by him and Heffron and I was more than excited to pick it up. There's a lot of new material in this book, from their own experience – stuff that didn't make it into Band of Brothers, or Beyond Band of Brothers, or any of the other collections that have come out about the Easy men – and once again it was a pleasure to be able to read it and hear about their experiences in WWII. These are incredible men, simply incredible.

A fantastic sequel to Bitten, and just as engrossing. Kelley Armstrong is fantastic. Once again, she has created a compelling plotline, and furthermore, she's introduced more characters, each of them unique and well developed in their own right. This is the second book in an enthralling series.

Many people call the Silmarillion dense – they say it's too hard to read, they say it's clunky and slow-going – and it's true. But so is a lot of Lord of the Rings. Tolkien writes like a historian, in this sense, and with the attention to detail and passionate worldbuilding he put into his life's work, it's no wonder he would want to share as much of it as he possibly could, spilling out into multitudes of different volumes just to fit it all in.

I read the Silmarillion for the first time just after reading Lord of the Rings, and I devoured it. It describes the beginning, the early times in Middle-Earth, and it is absolutely fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone who wants more time in Middle-Earth.

Ugh. Ugh. Appalling.

Having read the first three of Meyer's books, I was looking forward to this, the fourth installment in the series. Little did I know that Stephenie Meyer had gone completely insane between the third and fourth books.

The book started out as expected. Bella and Edward, about to be married, Bella clawing at Edward to sleep with her and Edward reluctantly agreeing. I wasn't surprised; Meyer had been leading up to this moment for three books already, it was about time. However, the godawful consequences of allowing it – a half-demon baby? A mutated part-vampire pregnancy that kills Bella (had Edward not turned her, she would surely have died)? And then, when the child is born and Bella becomes a vampire, all the pre-established canon flies out the window.

Turning into a vampire was difficult; was painful and hard, for every member of the Cullen family, no matter how pious or prepared for the turn, no matter how openly they welcomed the change or how reluctantly they took their new supernatural burdens. But not for Bella. No, Bella gets to frolic around hours after she's turned; days later she can hang out with her very human father with not so much as a batted eyelash. Ridiculous.

And the wrenching angst of imprinting, portrayed so beautifully in the first three books by the difficult love triangle between Sam Uley and his ex, Leah, and his imprint, Emily... gone. No, in Breaking Dawn, imprinting wipes out all love for everything you ever felt love for. No longer is it difficult and wrenching and hard. No, it's simple. Simple as pie!

I had to put the book down once Bella was turned, I was just too disgusted by the appalling deviation from a set canon, not to mention the amateurish writing. Meyer's editors must have been handed a bombshell. I don't know if I should applaud them or condemn them for being able to put it into printing condition.

I fear Stephenie Meyer may be a bit wrapped up in herself and her popularity – and Eclipse suffers for it. The romance in this book gets heavy-handed and frustrating. The constant comparisons to Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights are glaring and pretty irritating – these books are engaging and fun to read, but they are by no means literary classics. Seems a little bit egotistical.

My problem with Eclipse is that Bella, after three books, is STILL feeling unsure about Edward, constantly making self-depricating comments, and generally being a totally irritating whiner about how inferior she is to Edward's shiny wonderful perfection. I'm sorry, but after three books worth, I think it's time for either Bella to get over it or for Edward to smack her upside the head for it.

Furthermore, I miss Edward! The Edward Cullen I adored in book one is nowhere to be seen – here he is hot and cold, either overprotective and intense or distant and wary.

The competition between Edward and Jacob is by far the most interesting thing about the book – it's 600 pages long, and while the battle at the end is surely climactic, it took FAR too long to get there – the scenes in the tent are probably my favorites, with Jacob helping keep Bella warm and bantering with Edward the whole time.

I hope Stephenie Meyer slows down and really nails the next book, because if the series keeps going the way Eclipse went, she's not going to get the reception she's undoubtedly expecting.