I'm Back

Hi all! I'm back from my blog vacation, though, as it was also a work vacation, it will probably take me a couple of days to dig out and get back up to speed. I did manage to get some good reading done while I was away. I read:

• Fearless by Tim Lott (ARC from Candlewick, a dystopian fable about girls imprisoned in a hopeless school)
• Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles (another ARC from Candlewick, about what a girl has learned from her former best friend and tormentor)
• 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher (ARC from Razorbill, about a boy who receives 13 audiotapes from a girl he had a crush on, who committed suicide)
• Shrimp by Rachel Cohn (Simon & Schuster, second book in the series that started with Gingerbread, about a rebellious teen living in San Francisco)
• Spud by John van de Ruit (another ARC from Razorbill, about a young boy attending private school for the first time, in 1990 South Africa)
• North by Northanger by Carrie Bebris (Tor Books, the latest in an adult mystery series featuring Elizabeth Darcy, after Pride and Prejudice)
• Rounding the Mark by Andrea Camilleri (Penguin Books, from the Inspector Montalbano series set in Sicily)
• The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri (Penguin Books, from the above series)
• The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard (Ballantine Books, more a literary novel than a mystery, winner of the Agatha Award)
• I'm also halfway through Black Order by James Rollins (Harper, thriller about the secret Sigma Force arm of the US military)

I selected which books to take with me from my "to read" stack based largely on text to weight ratio, by which YA ARCs are a good choice (paperback, relatively dense). The weird thing is that four of the five YA books that I read included, in most cases as a major plot point, the death of a young adult. Just a coincidence, but still somewhat freaky. Perhaps that's what caused me to switch over to adult mysteries for the rest of the trip (someone usually dies in those, too, but it's less emotionally wrenching). Still, I enjoyed everything I read, and I especially enjoyed being able to find some time to read. I'll be back with more detailed comments on the YA books soon. It's great to be home!