Double-Stacked Bookshelves

I've been looking forward to reading Ransom Riggs' Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children for awhile now and have finally picked it up.  So, without further ado, here is today's teaser: "Each one would be dead before his sixteenth birthday, killed by the monsters he had so narrowly escaped.  But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late" (17). I'm excited for this read, though I've read some very differing reviews on it.  We'll see.  Happy Tuesday everyone :)

Alexander McCall Smith's La's Orchestra Saves the World was a pretty decent read.  Although, for me, it does not stack up to some of his serials ( 44 Scotland Street , etc.), I rather enjoyed it. La's is set, for the majority, during the span of WWII in the countryside of Suffolk.  The story begins with La (Lavender) and her developing relationship with Richard Stone.  The two share a whirlwind of a romance that leads, rather quickly, to marriage.  Not even two years later La is alone.  She then moves from Cambridge to Suffolk county into an old farmhouse owned by her in-laws.  It is here that La's life gains new purpose and she becomes a more self-assured individual.  While working on the home-front to help the citizens of Britain during a time of war, she meets a Polish soldier, Feliks, who has been sent to work on a neighboring farm.  Naturally La develops feelings for Feliks, though he's so uptight and reserved that she has no idea where he...

Julia Glass' Three Junes is by far, hands down the BEST book I've read this year.  It was the 2002 winner for the National Book Award for Fiction and definitely deserved it.  I picked this book up for my scattered Edinburgh bookclub and I can honestly say that it's my favorite of all that we have read in the past nearly three years (ugh).  It makes you laugh, cry, smile, and think.  That's what makes this book so good. The story centers around the McLeod family, natives of Scotland, and follows members across continents, years, relationships, sexuality, heartache, anguish, and happiness.  It's told in sections from the perspective of the patriarch, Paul, his oldest son, Fenno, and Fern, a woman who manages to weave herself into the lives of these two men without much effort and who, after the first section of this book, the reader does not really think about again. We first meet Paul in 1989 and are welcomed into his personal anguish over the death of his w...