tweet heart

Welcome to Twitter! Let the boy-stalking (ahem, following!) begin."
So begins this novel told entirely in e-mails, blogs and tweets between four high school friends at a prep school in the Carolinas as they navigate through spring semester of their junior year.
Claire (ClaireRBear) has been crushing on her school's most popular jock JD forever, although he doesn't know she exists. When JD(TopofGame17) starts following Claire on Twitter, she's really happy, but also confused, since in person he acts totally different.
Claire's best friend Lottie likes…well…everyone. Her username isn't "Lots0love" for nothing. Claire's guy friends, Bennett and Will, are both the geeky science fiction movie buff and video game type, although Bennett (KingofSlack) is several factors more annoying about it than quiet and sensitive Will (WiseOneWP).
When Claire starts to get suspicious about the difference between JD's entertaining and flirtatious tweets and his boring conversations in real life, something that started out innocent is suddenly looking like a matchmaking disaster…
At first, reading a bunch of tweeted conversations between characters was confusing to me, but as I got to know the characters and their intertwining stories, the format didn't matter as much anymore. The author included a few formatting features that make the conversations easier to follow, including having the characters' profile icons appear next to each tweet, setting private conversations apart in a blue outline, reprinting the date/time information and telling the story in chronological order, and making sure to include blog and email headers to give everything extra context. That said, this novelty format was still harder to just relax and read than a regular novel.
For a very modern take on high school relationships, check out Tweet Heart (a novel in e-mails, blogs and tweets) by Elizabeth Rudnick!
264 pages

serious, 16 of these?

I read sizzling sixteen by Janet Evanovich
I'm not proud. I don't have anything else to say about it.
307 pages.

main street

I read Main Street by Sinclair Lewis for book group in July. I was surprisingly irritated by the main character, a librarian who marries a doctor and moves to a small town and can't figure out how to fit in, but many people in the group defended her. I mostly liked this quote from the end about her baby daughter:
"Her baby, born in August, was a girl. Carol could not decide whether she was to become a feminist leader or marry a scientist or both, but did settle on Vassar and a tricolette suit with a small black hat for her Freshman year. "

And this whole passage about her young son:

Hugh was loquacious at breakfast. He desired to give his impressions of owls and F Street.
"Don't make so much noise. You talk too much," growled Kennicott.
Carol flared. "Don't speak to him that way! Why don't you listen to him? He has some very interesting things to tell."
"What's the idea? Mean to say you expect me to spend all my time listening to his chatter?"
"Why not?"
"For one thing, he's got to learn a little discipline. Time for him to start getting educated."
"I've learned much more discipline, I've had much more education, from him than he has from me."
"What's this? Some new-fangled idea of raising kids you got in Washington?"
"Perhaps. Did you ever realize that children are people?"
"That's all right. I'm not going to have him monopolizing the conversation."
"No, of course. We have our rights, too. But I'm going to bring him up as a human being. He has just as many thoughts as we have, and I want him to develop them, not take Gopher Prairie's version of them. That's my biggest work now -- keeping myself, keeping you, from `educating' him."

And this was the line that made me cry (because pretty much everything these days involving kiddos makes me cry a bit!):

Don't you ever get tired of fretting and stewing and experimenting?"
"I haven't even started. Look!" She led him to the nursery door, pointed at the fuzzy brown head of her daughter. "Do you see that object on the pillow? Do you know what it is? It's a bomb to blow up smugness. If you Tories were wise, you wouldn't arrest anarchists; you'd arrest all these children while they're asleep in their cribs. Think what that baby will see and meddle with before she dies in the year 2000! She may see an industrial union of the whole world, she may see aeroplanes going to Mars."
"Yump, probably be changes all right," yawned Kennicott.

I read 486 pages.

Fly on the wall

I listened to "Fly on the Wall" by e. lockhart read by Caitlin Greer while doing busywork at my desk the last two weeks at work.

First part sets up the story – Gretchen loves spiderman, doesn’t fit in at her art school in NYC, her parents just announced they are getting a divorce, her only friend Katya is busy al the time now, she is reading the Metamorphesis in literature class, she really likes Titus, a dark, scrawny, quiet a guy in her class, and really hates Shane, the new guy in school who dated her in the fall when he first arrived and then without warning dropped her for a sexier more popular girlfriend


When her parents go out of town for a week, she wakes up as a fly in the boys locker room of her school, where she is trapped.
At first she is just freaked out, and then she’s mad at how much better the boys locker room is than the girls. When boys start coming in to change for gym class, and then shower afterwards, she can’t help herself She watches. She rates them. She lusts and objectifies. But she also learns a lot about the guys in her school from watching them when they are together and alone in the locker room.

“And the moral is: you never know what’s going on underneath someone’s pants until you see it for yourself.”

Since Gretchen doesn’t know why she turned into a fly, she doesn’t know if or when she will change back “Nothing like this ever happens in Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.” Complaining about her situation (turned into a fly) and trying to understand who or what might have caused her to turn into a fly and why…

I listened to it: 4 hours