What I Read - February

I was able to do a lot of reading in February primarily due to our wonderfully lazy beach vacation.  The delayed flights and lengthy layovers certainly helped me in that regard as well!

Mark surprised me at Christmas with a Nook e-reader.  I am making a concerted effort to buy new books for my Nook instead of physical copies.  It is soooo hard for someone who likes to have a physical book in their hands.  I have really had to restrain myself from buying books while shopping at places like Target and Barnes & Noble.  Thankfully, I still have a good number of physical books piled up at home to keep me busy.  I will be discussing more about my Nook opinions in the future.

Now on to the books:

I finished the Spoils of Time trilogy with Into Temptation by Penny Vincenzi.  The trilogy was a real page turner for me, topping out at close to 2000 pages in total.  It is an historical fiction centered around a family- owned publishing house in London.  The trilogy starts (No Angel) around WWI time and progresses (Something Dangerous) through WWII.  Into Temptation centers around the emmigration of key family members to America and the emergence of American business as a world power.  I found the third book to be very engrossing.  It had the most plot twists and turns and intrigue of the three books.  If you want a series to fall into for some time, this is a good one.  I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Room by Emma Donoghue is also a page turner, but not for the faint of heart.  It is the deeply engrossing story of a woman and her five year old son who are being held captive in a backyard shed.  I don't want to say much more than that, to avoid giving anything away, but Room truly shows the capacity of a mother's love.  Unfortunately, it had a little bit of that "not wanting to look away from an accident" type of obsession for me until I finished the last page.  This was the first book I read on my Nook!  I give Room 4.5 stars out of 5.

I also read all three of The Hunger Games trilogy in February!  The first book was for my book club selection and was an incredible pick!  This is a teen fiction series which benefits from the lack of swearing and gratuitous sex, but still has all of the teen love angst and violence to be a page turner for teens and forty year olds alike.  It centers around a post-revolutionary world with a dictatorship government that requires a yearly fight-to-the-death "hunger game" event of teenage children.  This dramatic event, upon which the first book is centered around, evolves into much more, which is what occupies the subsequent two books.  I hate to go into much more detail, to avoid spoiling the series for you.  Seriously, though, buy the books and pass them on to your teens!  The first book was definitely my favorite, followed by the third.  I flew through all three though.  I have the first in paperback and had to get the other two electronically on my Nook (I just couldn't wait!!).  My score:  4.5 out of 5 stars.

Interestingly, I did pass this series on to Conor who wants nothing to do with it!  I think he believes that it is another Twilight phenomena (Oh, Edward . . . )!

I have some good books on slate for next month.  I don't believe I will be able to finish quite what I did in February though.  If you want to see what I'm reading currently, or get some good book ideas, check out Goodreads.com.