The Running Bibliophile

When A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness was published in February 2011, I kept picking it up and putting it back down at the bookstore. I was unsure if I'd like the book or not and didn't want to pay full price on a hardcover book.  Fast forward to the day after Thanksgiving, and my mom and I were doing our ritual Black Friday shopping and stepped into Barnes & Noble. A Discovery of Witches was on sale at 40% off, and I had a membership card that would give me another 10% off. I also had a coupon that would give me yet another 20% off. I finally decided I would buy the book. However, my mom wanted to buy it for me as a Christmas present, so I let her. It wasn't until July 2012 that I actually picked up the book to read, and I instantly fell in love with it. There isn't a way to describe what genre it belongs to because it is a cross over of sorts . . . fantasy, paranormal, historical fiction, a bit of science fiction, romance, and a bit of action...

All the Missing Girls starts off in the present day, jumps two weeks ahead, and then starts going backwards one day at a time.  From there it goes back to present day and then three months into the future. I'm not sure how I felt about the structure of the book. I didn't particularly care for the format, but if she had told it any other way, we would have know the entire plot, with the exception of the ending, within the first half of the book. Because of the way Megan Miranda wrote the book, it started off slowly and maintained the slowness through out most of the book. It wasn't until the last third of the book that it got really interesting. At that point, I had trouble putting it down, which is the reason I gave it 3 stars out of 5. As far as the characters go, I didn't feel like we really got to know any of them. They seemed so two dimensional. Even with them being two dimensional, I found both Daniel, Corrine, and Annaleise to be very unlikable. I h...

With the remake of the movie It coming out in the fall, I decided to read the book by Stephen King because I wanted to see the movie but not without first reading the book. In the month of May, I began reading It , and it took me four months to read it . . . 4 friggin months! Now, I did take a one week break where I read three other books, but the length of It was a bit too long for my liking. In the version I read, it was close to 1,500 pages! With that being said, I'm not sure that anything could have been cut from the book because it would have lost that wow factor for me. It's hard to believe that It was written in 1986 because it feels like it was written more recently. The only exception would be the references to things like Waldenbooks, which went out of business officially in 2011. However, most of them were gone in my area by 2002, so I became a bit nostalgic when I heard this bookstore mentioned. Bullying plays a large part in this book, wh...