2016 is almost over and lots of us our reflecting on the past year, taking a look at our goals and accomplishments. I thought it might be fun to look back at some of my old Top Ten Tuesday posts to see how I did with reading the books I said I was anticipating in 2015 & 2016.
(Hint: It’s not pretty.)
Anderson’s annual YA Lit Conference is a gathering of authors, educators and librarians (with some bloggers thrown in) to discuss … well, books. Then, the next day is the YA Fandom Frenzy—this day is geared toward fans and includes lots of fun games and activities. This year 33 authors were in attendance, including a few of my favorites.
This post is going to be a recap of the events AND a giveaway!
Time Traveling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Published by Schwartz & Wade on 10/4/16
Genres: Middle Grade, Contemporary, Science Fiction
Pages: 432
Source: The Publisher
Back to the Future meets The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in this original, poignant, race-against-time story about a boy who travels back to 1984 to save his father’s life.
My dad died twice. Once when he was thirty-nine and again four years later, when he was twelve. On his twelfth birthday, Al Chaudhury receives a letter from his dead father. It directs him to the bunker of their old house, where Al finds a time machine (an ancient computer and a tin bucket). The letter also outlines a mission: travel back to 1984 and prevent the go-kart accident that will eventually take his father’s life. But as Al soon discovers, whizzing back thirty years requires not only imagination and courage, but also lying to your mom, stealing a moped, and setting your school on fire—oh, and keeping your pet hamster safe. With a literary edge and tons of commerical appeal, this incredible debut has it all: heart, humor, vividly imagined characters, and a pitch-perfect voice.
NOTE: In case you missed the title of this post, BE WARNED NOW THAT IT WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! If you want my non-spoilery thoughts on this book, check out my review instead! Only read this post if you have already read the book and don’t mind reading some of my guesses about what might still happen in future books – or if you’re one of those crazy readers who likes to be spoiled. I won’t judge. 🙂
One other note: If you’ve already read the other books in this series as well, once you’re done reading this post, head over to my spoiler-filled discussions of One Dark Throne, “The Young Queen” and “The Oracle Queen” and Two Dark Reigns and give me your thoughts!
Even though I’m 42 years old, I’ve noticed a strange phenomena – I often dream that I’m still in high school or early college!
One recurring dream that I’ve had pretty much for as long as I can remember is that I’m in a ginormous school and I can’t find my locker – I wander aimlessly down the halls, going up and down stairwells, searching for a locker I should be able to find, with no luck. After I had my first child, I had a variation of the dream where I left my son in a random bathroom in my high school (nevermind that I’d been out of school for many years) and couldn’t find my way back to him. My subconscious was telling me that not only was I not going to be a very responsible parent, but I also had the maturity of high schooler still. High five, subconscious! Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Those of you who’ve been around my blog for a while know that usually, when I feature a guest post from an author on my blog (usually along with a review), it’s the author’s Top Ten Addictions. I like that it’s a fun, lighthearted tie-in to my blog name and that it’s a quick read. (If I’m being honest, I don’t usually take the time to read long author guest posts on blogs unless it’s a topic that really catches my eye or an author I REALLY love, so short always seems better to me.)
But it occurred to me that I’ve never shared my OWN top ten addictions, and I thought it would be fun to do that. So, here they are!
Ah, the dreaded spam comments … we all know them well.
Now, for the most part, my spam filter catches all these bad boys so that I never even have to set eyes on them. But the other day one slipped through the cracks and reading it just made me … laugh! It reminded me of the fun I had featuring spam on my blog once when I was a newbie blogger. (I called the post Spam-a-Lot).
So, I decided to take a peek into the abyss of the Spam folder to find a few gems and imagine … what if I was really going to reply to these random crazy comments? Take a look at what I might say.
The third day of BEA was much more laid back than the first two. (By the way, if you haven’t seen my recap of Day One or Day Two – and giveaways – check them out!) By Day Three, we’d gotten almost all the books that we really wanted to snag and I was feeling like everything we grabbed this day was a nice bonus. Because of that, we wandered a bit more and spent more time just randomly hanging out with other bloggers. Of course, that doesn’t mean we still didn’t pick up a good number of books …
The second day of BEA was, by far, the most tiring and crazy! (By the way, if you haven’t seen my recap of Day One and that giveaway, check it out!) This day was all about the books, and I have to tell you that by the end of the day, I had almost every book that I was really hoping for. My mom and I definitely did the divide and conquer thing – we actually spent most of the day in separate lines, which meant that we got ALL the books!
It’s hard for me to figure out how to even BEGIN this post. So much goes on at BEA, and it’s hard to put it all into words. For me, the absolute best part of the conference is meeting other bloggers and getting to know them (or getting to know them better, if I’ve already met them somehow). That goal was definitely achieved!
The first day was Blogger Con. My mom and I drove into the city and got there at around 8:30 (two hour drive at that time of the morning because of the traffic, but it was totally worth it).
