Six Degrees of Separation - From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to the Twilight Series

This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best, and I came across it on The Chocolate Lady's Book Review Blog last summer.  I thought this would be a great thing to do for my blog ahead challenge.  Also, this is supposed to be the first Saturday of the month thing, but I fit it into a little later in my month. Still thought it would be fun to do.

Anyway:  Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we start with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll:

So, I think at some point in my childhood I read part if not all of this book, but I of course know the story well either way, having seen the cartoon that I think Disney made when I was younger.  And of course, the very first book I thought of to jump to from this was:

Splintered by A.G. Howard is the first in one of my all time favorite series that is a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, and actually made me want to go back and make sure I had read the original. Not that I ever found the time to do that.  The book that I jumped to next was:

Now The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is not a retelling per se, but it did make me go back and read a book I'd never read because of how it featured in the story.  I'd never read Jane Eyre, until after this book.  This is also the time when I decided I needed to try to go back and start reading the classics that I felt I probably should have read when I was in school.  So of course, what book will I jump to next:

 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is one that I'd always heard a lot about, but had no idea exactly what the story was until the book above, and then I read it.  It was okay I guess, nothing that I got overly excited about.  Now, when we're talking about the classics I decided to read, I chose one that I'd heard was one of the greatest romances of all time:

I can honestly tell you that I pretty much HATED Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.  They all deserved the way things ended for them because they did it to themselves!  But of course this book really inspired so many other books, and one of those is the book that inspired me with my second tattoo:

The characters in this book, After by Anna Todd, love, hate, re-read the book Wuthering Heights over and over.  I can forgive them that, since the relationship is so similar in a way of how they keep messing it up.  But I couldn't put this book down, this whole series really. Even though I knew it was a totally toxic relationship, I liked how the author ended up getting them together in the end, with some realistic things to be done.  And of course that book will lead into the book that inspired me to get my first tattoo.

Say what you will about Twilight and the whole series, but I loved it.  It sucked me in and I couldn't put it down.  It connected me and my 11 year younger sister in such a wonderful way that we both got tattoos based on the covers of the books.  It got so many of my middle school students at the time hooked on reading, and that to me is more of what makes it so awesome!  Now I guess there is a lot

So that was fun!  Interesting to see what I think of as each new book in the chain.  Have you read these?  Honestly, other than two of them, I read and reviewed these so long before I started blogging I can't share my review. 

If you want to participate, the link above will take you to the host's site and you should totally join in!

Cover Characteristic - Keys

The Cover Characteristic meme is hosted at  Sugar and Snark.   Here are the guidelines:

Each week we will post a characteristic and choose 5 of our favorite covers with that characteristic. If you want to join in and share your 5 favorite covers with the weeks particular characteristic, then just make a post, grab the meme picture (or make your own) and leave your URL in Linky (so we can visit).
You don’t even need to participate, just stopping by and saying hi would be great! Don’t forget to stop by the other participants!


So I had all my books picked, and then I lost the piece of paper I'd written them down on!  I went back through all my books I've already read on Goodreads, and could only find 4, until I tried one more time and finally found the last one!  So without further ado, here are my 5 covers with keys.

5.

4.

3.

2.

This one was almost my favorite, as I love how the key makes the NYC skyline.

1.  But this, this one is my favorite.  The key isn't huge, but it is like all the other things that you look and find throughout the beautiful cover, all things that relate to bits of the story.

So, what do you think of my cover choices? 

A to Z April: E Reviews - Emily's Reasons Why Not by Carrie Gerlach/The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Today I have another Chick Lit book to share, as well as a book that is really hard to describe quite what it is, except for that I love the series.  Once again I'm going to share the synopsis from Goodreads along with a few sentences about why I like it.

First is Emily's Reasons Why Not which is another fun romantic story based on a single woman about to turn 30.  She still hasn't found the right guy and is feeling the crunch at her age.  Again this came in a time when I was early 30s and it just kind of resonated with how I felt at the time.  Here's the blurb from Goodreads:
Hollywood publicity pro extraordinaire Emily Sanders is hitting thirty –– hard –– and she wants the life her best friends seem to have: house, kids, perfect man. But finding true love isn't easy in L.A., where image is everything, and where every beauty pageant winner is an eight in a sea of nines, who all wish they were Julia Roberts.

For Emily, boyfriend material has always come in many strange shapes and incarnations –– beautiful young surfer god, aging music executive, boss's boss's boss, and a baseball player with two cell phones (one of which she does not have the number to).

With her confidence rapidly heading due south (like everything else on her body), it's time to find a smart, sharp–eyed psychotherapist to help her get past her surefire method for choosing the absolute worst man. With a little help, maybe Emily can learn to narrow her focus from looking for Mister Right to looking out for Mister Wrong. Because she knows that, eventually, "the one" comes for every woman ... even for a disarming, unflappable player in the mad, mad world of entertainment, with the edge of an insider and the heart of a dreamer.

I guess you might call The Eyre Affair a fantasy type of story.  It is set in a world where the books are something that people can go into, and characters can come out of.  As the title might have you guess, there is something going on in the book Jane Eyre.  And the main character works for the department of police that has to fix these types of things.  I'd never read Jane Eyre before this, so then I had to read it.  And I think this is probably what led me into trying to read more classics.  For awhile I would read a classic every 10 books. Here's the blurb from Goodreads:
Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
And something really cool, I got to meet the author a few years ago when he came to one of the public libraries in Kansas City.  Here I am with him!

So those are my E reviews!  And don't forget while you're here to enter my month long giveaway below!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: The Revelation of Louisa May by Michaela MacColl

First, thanks to Chronicle Books and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  Now, I have to admit that I've never read Little Women, or seen the movie, or read anything by Louisa May Alcott.  But, I'd never read Jane Eyre until I read the book The Eyre Affair.  While this was an okay story, not sure that it makes me need to read any of her books.  I was intrigued though, as I always am, by any book that takes a look at an author's life, especially fictional books because they can add in some fun details. 

This story is about Louisa May Alcott's life when she was about 15 and her mother had to go work in another city to bring the family money.  I guess I didn't realize that the author lived in a community with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  I really liked that bit of history that was woven into the story.  Louisa's family was also very much into the abolitionist movement,  to the point of being part of the Underground Railroad.  In the story, when Louisa's mother goes to the job she leaves Louisa in charge of the household, which includes not only doing the housework, cooking and cleaning for her father, but also watching her younger sister Beth, while her mother took the youngest, May, with her.  The household management included a "package", the runaway slave George, who showed up right as Louisa's mother, Marmee, was leaving. 

For Louisa's first time being in charge, things didn't go that smoothly, because at the same time she had a slave to protect, a slave catcher showed up in town looking for him.  And the slave catcher happened to know Henry, as well as another woman that wasn't trusted, Miss Whittaker.  One somewhat happy thing that seemed to occur was that Louisa's cousin Fred showed up.  While they used to be the best of friends, Fred had changed.  He'd grown up into a very handsome young man, and seemed to be interested in Louisa as more than a friend/cousin as well. 

When one of the players in the story turns up dead towards the end, the trials of the story soon turn into a murder mystery, one that Louisa feels she must solve, even if it means that someone she loves and respects, or feels sympathy for, is a murderer. 

I have to say the mystery was a good one, there was lots of story with actual factual bits sprinkled throughout as well.  While it gave me a bit of a history legend on some authors I didn't know that much about, as I said before, I will personally not be adding any of their books to my TBR at this time.  I think that the writing is probably done a lot like Alcott does in her books, at least it reminded me of how I think that the books were written, from what little I know of them. 

If you like the author Alcott's books, I'm guessing you'll enjoy this.  If you enjoy a good murder mystery, with some historical fiction thrown in, you'll also probably enjoy this.  I will definitely be adding it to my list of books to possibly order into the high school library where I work because of all the historical bits and the link to the authors' real lives.  I like that at the end there is even a few pages telling what everything was based on, and where truth and fiction intersected.