Double-Stacked Bookshelves

I borrowed Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns over a year ago from a dear friend and am finally getting around to reading (it was in storage for about a year due to a house fire...yeah).  I've yet to read The Kite Runner , or see the movie, but it's on my list; my ever growing list.  Regardless, so far I'm loving this book...here's a teaser: "Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces.  But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to her" (153). Definitely worth the read...

I'm halfway through with the dreaded week of finals; I still have a stack of final essays to grade and one department grading session to complete this week before I can sign off for a much needed week long break, but it's finally starting to wind down.  Added to the chaos that is final's week, the Euro Cup started a few days ago and I have watched every game (even if I had to DVR it and watch it later).  Naturally this takes time away from grading essays (whoops) and posting reviews.  However, this is a necessary evil because I LOVE the Euro Cup and football/soccer in general, as I stated in a previous post .  But that's beside the point.  It's Tuesday and that means one thing: teaser time!  I've picked up a quick read because I'm behind on my GoodReads 2012 Challenge quota and I'm trying desperately to get caught back up.  So today's teaser comes from Nora Roberts' The Last Boyfriend .  It's the second in the Inn BoonsBoro series and just

I've still not written a review for Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ...or The Girl who Played with Fire , both of which I've finished.  I promise I'll get to it.  Despite that, here's a teaser from the third and final book in the series, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest : "Then he cut away the bandage that the emergency team had wrapped around her skull.  He froze when he saw another entry wound.  The woman had been shot in the head, and there was no exit wound there either" (6) I'm only about 100 pages into this book, but I'm enjoying it so far :)  Happy Tuesday all!

Sometimes a book comes along that has something special to it.  That spark or element that makes you fall in love with it and hope that it never ends.  Ruta Sepetys' Between Shades of Gray was one of those books for me.  I randomly picked this book up at Wal-Mart (it was cheap and sounded good) and I'm so glad that I did because I don't know if I'd have picked it up anywhere else...or even remembered that I read the back of it.  Gray follows the story of Lina and her family as they try to survive the terrible effects of WWII; including deportation, harrowing traveling experiences, Soviet labor camps, Siberia and the Arctic Cirlce, cruel winters, and even crueler captors.  What ensues is one girl's struggle to survive despite all odds.  Through all of this, she is able to take solace in her art; the one thing that her captors cannot take from her.  With her art, Lina is able to document the atrocities that befall her and her fellow captives at the hands of the Sovi

I know I finished Ransom Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children quite a while ago, but I just haven't had the time (or inclination) to write a review, or any review for that matter.  So, instead of grading the ever growing pile of essays on my desk, I figured I'd at least get one review, this one, out of the way! Peregrine follows the adventures of Jacob and his search into his grandfather's past.  After the untimely death (murder?!) of his grandfather, Jacob sets off to discover who his grandfather really was.  This leads him to a small island off the coast of Great Britain.  While there, he discovers that the orphanage his grandfather lived in during the war had been partially destroyed in 1943.  However, he soon stumbles upon a vortex of sorts that takes him back to the island during WWII and the home his grandfather resided in with other "displaced" children.  This vortex allows Jacob, and those he encounters, to inhabit both the present