summer update: I'm back!

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Hello! Half of the summer's over already (whaaat) and I'm finally back in town and here to stay for at least the month of August. Many books were read over the past few weeks, so hopefully Pass the Chiclets will grind back into gear and start rolling. Here's hoping that once I get back into the groove of review-writing, things will get busy.

Books to review:

1. Chasing Shadows by Swati Avasthi. I loved her debut novel, Split, and this was an adventurous, ambitious second book, not without its problems.
2. The Burning Sky by Sherry Thomas. Also a historical romance writer, I was eager to read this one (WoC author! Good ol' fashioned high fantasy!) and it mostly did not disappoint. Excited to review it.
3. Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem by Mac Barnett, illustr. by Adam Rex. Somehow I'd missed this picture book when it came out, written by the guy who wrote Extra Yarn and illustrated by the guy who wrote The True Meaning of Smekday. All in all, a fun, quirky read.
4. Spirit's Key by Edith Cohn. [September 9 2014] I had high hopes for this MG magical realism title, enough that I requested an advance copy. Unfortunately, it didn't quite fulfill them.

Rereading books is always interesting because it isn't something that I do very much, compared to the amount of new books that I read; at the moment, I'm in the middle of rereading both The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge, two middle-grades that engage my emotions in resonant, different ways. It'll be fun(/heartbreaking?) to see how I feel after my round through this time. People have postulated before that sometimes rereading is essential for really appreciating or understanding a book, sort of like listening to a song multiple times before deciding whether you like it or not. I'm not in full agreement with this theory, especially considering the ways which we process those two different mediums, but it has merit, I think.

Lately I've been feeling inspired by my friends over at The Sirenic Codex, who not only have redesigned their blog from the back end in a beautiful, Tumblr-inspired theme, but also have fabulous discussion posts like this one. Book blogging is about community and who you know and who you're friends with, and none of those are inherently better or worse, but sometimes I just step back and look at pure, polished content, and think: "That's what I want to produce."

Hope your summer's going well!

<3

Eden