Armchair BEA 2013: Wrap-Up

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It's already the last day of Armchair BEA 2013! This was our first time participating, and it's been a fantastic experience discovering so many amazing blogs and chatting about books. We'll definitely take part in this again.

Unfortunately, we both had an extremely busy week outside of blogging, including a graduation to attend, so we didn't get to devote as much time to everything as we'd hoped, including the Twitter chats, which we completely missed out on. Now that we have a better idea of what to expect, we now know that we need to plan a little further ahead, like with writing posts, next year.

We'd like to thank every single one of you who stopped by this week and said hi. It was great getting to meet all of you! We hope to get to continue talking about books with you.

A huge thank you also goes out to the Armchair BEA organizers for all of their hard work putting together this awesome event. We had a lot of fun this week, and we look forward to next year's ABEA!

Armchair BEA 2013: Non-Fiction

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I rarely read non-fiction. I had to read a lot of it in college, and let's just say that it was less than page-turning reading for me. Fiction has always been my thing, though if a subject is of great interest to me, that's when I might check out a non-fiction book about it.

For instance, I read Paul Murray Kendall's biography of Richard III after reading Sharon Kay Penman's outstanding historical fiction novel, The Sunne in Splendour, in which the last Plantagenet king is portrayed in a much more heroic light than in Shakespeare's play. Kendall's biography is the perfect companion to Penman's novel, and if you're going to read Sunne, trust me, you'll want to find a copy of Kendall's book, too.

I love Jane Austen, and I've read two biographies about her: Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen: A Life and Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen. I thought both of them relied heavily on discussing members of her family for whom there is more biographical information available than it did about Austen herself. I think the best bet for possibly gaining some insight into her life is by reading the collection of her letters.

I'm not sure if this counts as non-fiction or not, but I also loved reading Harry Potter Page to Screen: The Complete Filmmaking Journey. It's an amazing behind-the-scenes look at the making of all eight films, complete with gorgeous photographs of everything from the actors to the sets to the props as well as concept art illustrations. I had to own this as soon as I heard about it, and it was worth every penny. And if books about the making of movie/television adaptations of books count as non-fiction, then I'll also put in a good word for The Making of Pride and Prejudice (as in the one with Colin Firth as Darcy) and The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film. The P & P book is on the short side, at a little over 100 pages, but come on—it has photos of Colin Firth in it! The "diaries" in the title of the S & S book refer to the diaries of Emma Thompson (Elinor Dashwood), and she's an excellent, and often witty, writer.

I really don't have any non-fiction recommendations for someone new to the genre. Most of my non-fiction reads I pick up because I want to learn more about a particular topic. Do you read any non-fiction? Are there any subjects that you really enjoy reading about?

Armchair BEA 2013: Giveaway!

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Yay! It's giveaway day! One winner will get to choose any paperback book up to $10. If you live here in the U.S., your book will be shipped via Amazon, otherwise it will be shipped via The Book Depository. Just fill out the Rafflecopter form below to enter!

** Giveaway **

• You must be at least 13 years old to enter.
• Winner will be notified via email and have 48 hours to respond or else another winner will be chosen.
• Book will be shipped directly from Amazon if the winner lives in the U.S., or from The Book Depository if the winner lives outside the U.S. and The Book Depository ships to your country (you can check by clicking here). We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or damaged packages.
• Giveaway ends at midnight on June 2, 2013.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Armchair BEA 2013: Genre Fiction

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Today's book-related topic is genre fiction. Paranormal is easily my favorite genre. I am a big-time paranormal reader, particularly YA paranormal. Vampires, witches, wizards, warlocks, angels, demons, aliens, werewolves and any others I’ve forgotten—I love reading about them all, especially vampires. I read for escapism, and for me, nothing is better than a book that pulls me into a world where anything is possible and the impossible seems real.

Not surprisingly, a good number of my favorite books, the ones that I would reread over and over again, are from this genre. If I had to pick a few to recommend to someone looking to try out paranormal, here are the ones I'd go with:

• The Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead: I put off reading this for a very long time because the cover did absolutely nothing for me. I finally gave in last year and read it, and I LOVED these books! I love that Rose is no-nonsense, and Dimitri . . .aaahhh. Also recommended: the VA spin-off, Bloodlines. Adrian . . . aaahhh.
• The Unearthly series by Cynthia Hand: I tried quite a few angel books before this series, and they were all duds. Unearthly turned out to be exactly what I'd been looking for, and the love triangle is exceptionally well-written (i.e., it doesn't make me want to pull my hair out. I actually LIKE this one!)
• The Space Between by Brenna Yovanoff: I read this a month ago, and I'm still thinking about it. Fantastic novel about demons.
• Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan: I found the humor in this book laugh-out-loud hilarious. The novel also takes on a dark tone at times, but it was the humor that made this an instant favorite of mine. The one thing about this book that was not funny at all? That evil, evil ending (If you've read Unspoken, then you know what I mean.).

Are you a fellow paranormal fan? Or is there another genre that you happily read time and time again?

Armchair BEA 2013: Classics

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When it comes to the classics, I fall into the "Sadly Unread" category. My first real exposure to them was through my high school English classes, and the majority of books on my reading lists didn't really click with me. Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and The Scarlet Letter are only a few of the books that ended up being meh reads for me. And almost 20 years later, I still don't know what A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was about. At the time, I had to read the Cliffs Notes on that one before taking a test on it because I had no clue what was going on. (I also don't know where my copy went; I think I lent it to a friend who apparently never returned it, not that I was particularly heartbroken about it or anything.)

Maybe the fact that I was forced to read these books had some kind of influence on my opinion of them. I certainly wasn't very keen on spending my summers reading a stack of books that I never would have chosen on my own. It was even worse when a book ended up being as dull as I'd feared. Once I was out of college, I didn't picture myself reading classic literature voluntarily very often.

The two big exceptions to my lack of success reading the classics are Shakespeare and Jane Austen. I read Romeo and Juliet as a high school freshman, but it wasn't until I read Hamlet in senior year that I really fell in love with Shakespeare. Every line was just so brilliant to me, not to mention the madness and the regicide! I've read the four big tragedies (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear, and though I like the other three, Hamlet is by far my favorite.

I somehow never read Jane Austen while I was in school. I first became interested in her works after watching the 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. It took me about another five years to finally crack open an Austen novel, which was Sense and Sensibility. I read all six novels in succession, with Pride and Prejudice in the lead as my favorite until I got to Persuasion, which completely blew me away. The rekindled romance between Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth had me swooning for weeks after I read that book. It's my favorite Austen novel, my favorite novel ever period, and the one classic that I recommend reading to anyone who'll listen.

Now that I'm (a lot) older, I'd like to try reading the classics again, maybe even reread some of the ones that I originally found lacking, as a once-in-a-while type of thing. I hope that I've gained more of an appreciation for them over the years; it's something that I really didn't have as a teenager. Since I'd be reading them because I want to, perhaps I'll be able to sit back and enjoy them.

Are there any classics that you love and recommend? I'd love to hear about them!

Armchair BEA 2013: Introduction

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We're extremely excited to participate in this year's Armchair BEA! We're new to the event, and we're really looking forward to all of the fun this week!

A Little About Us:

1. Please tell us a little bit about yourself: Who are you? How long have you been blogging? Why did you get into blogging?

We're Ally and Lee, and we're (second) cousins. We've been blogging for a little over a year now, and we first got the idea to start a book blog while taking one of our after-dinner walks. We realized that every evening, from the time we left the house to the time we got back, we were discussing whatever we were reading at the moment. We also realized that no one else we knew shared our reading obsession, and we thought it'd be fun to connect with other readers who understood what a vital part of our lives books are (the rest of our family doesn't get it).

2. Have you previously participated in Armchair BEA? What brought you back for another year? If you have not previously participated, what drew you to the event?

This is our first year taking part in Armchair BEA. The blog was a little more than a month old this time last year, and there were so many things we didn't know then, like that this event existed. We found out about it too late, and we definitely didn't want to miss out this year because it sounded like so much fun and a great way to meet other bloggers!

3. Tell us one non-book-related thing that everyone reading your blog may not know about you.

Ally plays the flute and is a member of her school's marching and concert bands. Lee loves photography and is often seen with a camera, clicking away.

4. If you could eat dinner with any author or character, who would it be and why?

We're both obsessed with Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys, and we had to sort of compromise over which character to choose. Ally loves Ronan and Lee's more of a Gansey fan, but in the end we went with Ronan because we'd like to meet his raven, Chainsaw, too. Dinner conversation with Ronan would be very interesting because he's often not the most sociable of people. We'd have to ask him how the search for Glendower is going, and if he can possibly tell us anything about the next book, The Dream Thieves, which we are dying to read.

5. What literary location would you most like to visit? Why?

Hogwarts! We'd get to do magic and have all kinds of adventures exploring the castle!

Please feel free to leave a link so we can drop by your intro post, too!