Rain, rain, go away...

...come again some other day -- perhaps a day when I am off work and can enjoy the delightful lull of your soft pattering on my windows. A day when I can curl up in a blanket with a book and a cup of coffee.

Cliche though it may be, my favorite rainy day activity truly is reading.  If I'm to be completely honest, my favorite any-day activity is probably reading, as well, but for the sake of the introduction to this post, we're focusing on a few of my rainy-day recommended reads. These are books I've read recently that I could not put down once I opened them, and thus they were devoured in a day's time. Click on the links below the books to open their respective GoodReads pages if you want to check out their synopses.

Anna and the French Kiss

While scrolling through one of my favorite bookworm-fabulous Tumblrs, I stumbled across a post that advertised this eBook for a one-day-only price of $2.99. I checked out the synopsis on GoodReads and decided it was worth a shot. This book made me laugh, and though it didn't make me cry, there were some heartstring-tugging moments toward the end -- but it was a fun read. Yes, it's your stereotypical YA romance novel formula -- boy meets girl, boy and girl like each other but there are circumstances that get in the way, etc. -- but the characters were more realistically written (at least in my opinion) than they normally are in these types of books. They have more depth because none of them are perfect, all of them have problems, and they have conversations to get to know each other.

Flat-Out Love

Man, oh, man. I adored this book. One of my lovely friends recommended it to me, and I snagged the eBook right away. At first, the writing and the dialogue come off a little strong -- I thought that Jessica Park was trying a bit too hard to make her teenage characters sound witty and intelligent -- but then farther into the book, I couldn't possibly imagine the characters (that I had gotten to know and utterly adore) speaking any other way. I had tears rolling down my cheeks by the time I finished. 

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

Last (but definitely not least) is the book that I highly recommend to anyone anywhere who has ever in their life worked in the book industry. When I regale my mother, husband, or friends with work stories involving customers and the questions they ask, I am always encouraged to document them so that I may compile them into a book at a later date. Looks like someone beat me to it, ha! In this magical book, you will find clueless customer classics such as, "Did Anne Frank ever write a sequel?" and "I read a book about thirty years ago. It had a green cover. Do you have it?" and "Can I return this once I've read it? Why isn't there a place where I can do that?"  It is simultaneously hilarious and sad. If I hadn't worked in the book industry for nearly four years, I would suspect that some of the scenarios in this book are made up... but I am living proof that these questions are actually asked every single day by readers and non-readers alike.

If you have any book recommendations for me, hit me up in the comments -- unless it's that Fifty Shades (or Fifty Shades inspired) crap, because then I'd be forced to advise you to go get properly laid.

Thanksgiving & more

Our Thanksgiving couldn't have possibly been more perfect.

It wasn't the biggest Thanksgiving to-do we've ever had, obviously, but everyone in the immediate family was  there. Mom, Dad, Jessica, Eric, Jeremy, and me. That's what matters. My Uncle Kenny even stopped by for a while to visit and to pick up plates of food for himself and his wife who was at home sick.

Everyone was in a good mood and everyone was so present, if you know what I mean. Nobody was zoned out staring at the television, nobody was compulsively checking their phone, nobody was distracted. We were all there exclusively for seeing each other, and it was warm and happy and home.

Also... Dad ate. Dad ate a lot, actually, considering that his meals for the past couple of weeks consisted of vanilla-flavored Ensure and potato soup. Mom fixed his plate with small portions of everything we had -- ham, chicken and dressing, corn, green beans, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, stuffed eggs -- and he ate at least a couple of bites of everything. He was positively thrilled to have a home-cooked meal.  We were all so grateful; it was the best day that he'd had in weeks. 

The rest of my days have been filled with the usual: running errands for (and visiting with) my parents, occupying my free time organizing things for our move (we pick up the keys this week -- yippee!), snuggling my sweetie pie, and reading.

Oh, reading!

I finally jumped head-first into The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes. I devoured it in three sittings and I loved it. Rainbow and Bethany had both highly recommended Marian Keyes to me. Rainbow suggested Rachel's Holiday as a first read, but since I couldn't find it in our local bookstore (and since the library didn't carry it), I picked this one up as an alternative and it's exactly what I needed to pull me out of my reading slump. I'm currently working on my other library selection, Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer, and it seems like a unique little story so far. I'm enjoying it, but I think I'm picking up another Marian Keyes after I finish it.

Maybe next time I post, I'll have pictures for you guys. I promised Jennifer photos once we get it fully set up, but I think progress photos would be fun as well.  :-)

Hope you all are doing well. If you have my current address and need my new one, hit me up in the comments! Christmas card time is approaching! ♥

Machinery

An excerpt from The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.

Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this -- how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery.  It's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes.  Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone.

A man lives so many different lengths of time.
A man is so many different lengths of time.
Change. Collapse. Reinvention.

Favorite quotes from Odd Thomas, part 1.

I'm currently in the middle of re-reading my favorite book -- Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz. Here's the intro (wonderful, wonderful) and a few of the many highlighted quotes in my tattered copy.

"My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist.

I am not a celebrity. I am not the child of a celebrity. I have never been married to, never been abused by, and never provided a kidney for a transplantation into any celebrity. Furthermore, I have no desire to be a celebrity.

In fact I am such a nonentity by the standards of our culture that People magazine not only will never feature a piece about me but might also reject my attempts to subscribe to their publication on the grounds that the black-hole gravity of my noncelebrity is powerful enough to suck their entire enterprise into oblivion.

I am twenty years old. To a world-wise adult, I am little more than a child. To any child, however, I'm old enough to be distrusted, to be excluded forever from the magical community of the short and beardless."

"You can con God and get away with it if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next. He'll also cut you some slack if you're astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life."

"Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way."

"I prefer ghosts to be somber. There's something about a walking dead man trying to a get a laugh that chills me, perhaps because it suggests that even postmortem we have a pathetic need to be liked -- as well as the sad capacity to humiliate ourselves."

"Fire scares me, yes, and earthquakes, and venomous snakes. People scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable."

"From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity."