It all leads to dust (for now)

In my last post, I said that I hoped to finish Lifelines that night - I did, even though I shouldn't have. I stayed up until a little after three am to finish the book, but it was quite interesting. The romance portions of the book were not as strong throughout the book as they seemed they would be from the beginning of it. The solution to the mystery part was not something I expected at all - I'd pegged somebody else as the trouble-maker, although I did have the motive correct. A day or so after finishing the book, I realized that one question in the plot was never quite answered. CJ Lyons hinted at the cause of Amanda's symptoms, but never quite brought it to the forefront of the book. I'm happy everything worked out in the end for the "good guys" of the book; but I did expect it had to work out that way. As happens with many books I read - I'd like to know what else happens to these characters - I want the day-to-day "normal" stuff as well. I do understand why the story ended where it did, but I came to like the characters and would like to learn more about them.



Yesterday after work was the first chance I got (without staying up even later after finishing Lifelines to start the next book on my list. I first saw Beth Fantaskey's book Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side in a stack of books that were going back to the bookmobile after being returned at the main library. From the little I could infer based upon the title, cover picture, and the beginning of the front inside cover description of the book, I was expecting something rather similar to the Twilight series. There were a lot of similarities - good looking high-school vampire, pretty high-school girl, secrets kept from most everyone else, and another teenage love interest for the girl - but much of the plot was different as well. The parents were in on the vampire secret for one thing, no glittering for another, and the occasional fangs as well. This book really seemed to be a blend of Princess Diaries (the movie) and the Twilight series with a little of the Harry Potter series (mostly just the first book) thrown in. All in all, I enjoyed the book and, yet again, stayed up too late (around 1:30am) to finish it, while wishing that I could know what happened after the ending.

Going back to a book I've already written a bit about, I remembered that one last comment I wanted to make on Julie & Julia. Near the end of the book, Julie is at the butcher shop getting the marrowbone for her final recipe. The butcher asks about the end of the project, and then also asks if she's getting the marrowbone for (I can't remember what the exact word was, but he was right about the purpose) because if she is, he can cut the bone in half for her - this comes after hours-long attempts involving lots of painstaking scraping the marrow out of the hollow portion of the bone (which at least the first time came after attemps with a hacksaw (I think it was)) for multiple recipes in the past. Her thought: "Now he tells me."

One last section for this post. There's about a month left until the next Lemmings book club (mostly family members and their/our friends) meeting, so I'm thinking I really ought to make sure I'll finish that one in time - especially as the same week as the Lemmings book club meeting is the meeting for the book club at church and both books are rather large. I am about three pages into The Grapes of Wrath at the moment. After fifth grade (or maybe sixth) I tried starting this book, but found it too boring that time. I'm intrigued to see what I think of it now - I don't know if perhaps some of the themes will make more sense to me now or anything. Choosing that book now also partially came about because I'd finished all of the library books I'd had and it was on hand - I needed something to read and was going to need to read it, so here I go.