People have raved to me about Suzanne Collins' the Hunger Games trilogy for the past four years. At first I stayed away from it because I was deep in trenches of The Wheel of Time series, a 15-novel epic that consumed 2 years of my literary life. Upon finishing WoT, I jumped immediately into A Song of Ice & Fire (Game of Thrones) and just last month I was finally able to see what all the fuss is about. The Hunger Games is a three-novel dystopian fantasy series that follows

​Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman Unlike many people, I did not find out about this book solely through the Netflix series. I first became aware of Piper Kerman and her year spent in a women's prison back in May 2013 while listening to NPR's radio show "The Moth." At some point before the show got picked up by Netflix, Ms. Kerman told part of her story during one of the Moth events and at the end, the announcer mentioned the show. I liked what I heard, so I gave the

​A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire: Book 1) George R.R. Martin 5 stars So... I don't know if I love this book because (a) I love the show, (b) it's the cool thing to do, or (c) because it's just a great book. I guess its a little bit of all, but mostly "c". Intrigued by the HBO Series "Game of Thrones", I was hungry to read these books, off of which the show is based. In fact, I had to hurry through the last few novels of the "Wheel of Time" series to get to it.

Lately, I've reviewed the books I've read on goodreads.com due to convenient formatting, but I feel called to do this next review the old-fashioned bloggy-style way. That and I'm not just reviewing one book, but 14 books all at once. These books culminate to be Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time" series that I've been actively reading since (I think) November 2010. That's right. It's been a journey that's taken me nearly two years to complete. The following ramblings are my t

If you've followed my blog for a while, then you know that I have a lot of respect for Eat, Pray, Love author, Elizabeth Gilbert. The ironic thing is that this book is the first thing that I've ever read of hers. I was introduced to Gilbert through her lecture on TED.com about the creative genius (I can't stress enough that every human needs to watch it and listen). Eat, Pray, Love has been on my "to-read" list for ages and last week I decided to take a break from the Wheel o

Before ever reading Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, I was enticed by the movie. Yep, the movie. The one that is nothing like the book, except for some vague references. It's not uncommon for a book to be better than the movie version, so it was no surprise to me that I liked the book more. What did surprise me was that the book ended up being one of my most favorite. Originally written in French way back in the 1800s, I rely on the mercy of the translator to conve

​"Congo" by Michael Crichton If you've only ever seen the movie (in all of it's pure 90's awesomeness), then you haven't treated yourself to the greatness that is Michael Crichton's novel Congo. I fell in love with Crichton's writing about eight years ago upon reading Jurassic Park. Like the movie, Congo follows Peter Elliot and his sign-language speaking gorilla, Amy, as they search for an ancient lost city called Zinj. That's about as much as the book and movie have in co

The TV show Dexter is based off of this first novel in a series by Jeff Lindsay. I was interested in reading this book after becoming an addict of the show (The same thing happened to me with True Blood and the Sookie Stackhouse books). Needless to say, the show has come quite far from Darkly Dreaming Dexter, but after 5 seasons, that is to be expected. As a piece of literary work, it was an easy and fun read. The story flowed well, even with the sporadic flashbacks. Lindsa

I read this book in a day, for real. The Alchemist is a story about an adolescent boy who, after having reoccurring dreams, decides to abandon his life as a shepherd and travel from Spain to Egypt to see the pyramids and find hidden treasure. Santiago, the shepherd boy, finds along the way that the journey is the point of his quest, not the destination. In the two plus years it takes him to reach his goal, he encounters thieves, gypsies, a girl with whom he falls in love, une