It's Monday - and I'm not stressed about it. HaHa

At least it's a holiday-ish Monday. It's an unpaid "work furlough" day for school employees, but hey - better than being laid off. It's sad state for education when school employees are forced to have this attitude...hey, we work with future adults, but don't worry about budgeting enough money for schools, materials or salaries.....just sayin'
Just watched a quirky, dark comedy called Skills Like This. Funny as hell, even though the subject matter is a little....off. A playwright finally realized that he sucks as a writer, and kind of goes off the deep end, doing things he normally wouldn't do. Funny as hell.
Which brings me to our Monday Meme - hosted by Sheila of Book Journey. It's Monday, What Are You Reading? This is the time and place for us to "get together" in an online sort of way, to "talk" about what we're reading, what we've read and if we have plans to read. Full guidelines are available at Sheila's site, just click on the pic - or the link. I tend to hide links under pics....most of the time

I don't normally list the children's books that I read, usually just forget. I read quite a few in my job as a library tech, usually to the kinder, 1st and 2nd grades, but I also have weekend reading with the grandchildren. With the grandchildren, we tend to re-read some of the books for weeks at a time. The current line up consists of between one or five Skippyjon Jones books and Miss Nelson Is Missing! Yup...over and over and over again. At least the Skippyjon Jones books are fun to read - you can practice your spanish accent, catch some funny wordplay and the scrapes this little kitty gets into is pretty funny. As for Miss Nelson...A soft spoken teacher has no control over her class, she disappears, and this witchy ugly, scary Miss Viola Swamp takes over for a while. A lot of the younger kids I've read this to don't get that both women are the same character. However, my granddaughter caught on after I'd read it a few times....there's one little line that clues you in without coming right out with it.

The one book I finished this week was Jennifer Crusie's newest book, Maybe This Time. I was looking for a non-paranormal in between books read, y'know, a book that's just regular to "cleanse" the ol' brain palate between reading excellent novels of the fantasy genre. This actually turned out to have ghosts and a horror twist to it. I was surprised, because normally Crusie's books are more about relationships and slightly flawed, even mildly criminal characters in love. I'm not complaining though, because I enjoyed this novel so much. Looney Toons Kids, crazed ghosts, flawed characters, this book has it all. There's sex in it, but even though the sex was charged, (not money, charged like electric) it wasn't an overwhelming part of the story - it didn't totally overshadow the rest of the book. Perfect combination of horror, humor, bit-of-sex, relationship, jealousy and intrigue. I should save all this for a review, but I just finished it Sunday night, so it's all fresh in my head. :) Jennifer Crusie is the author of quite a few books, I've read some a few years ago, and now I'm wondering why I haven't kept up with her writing. I need to rectify that.

Currently Reading - I happened to see a book titled Saints Astray by Jacqueline Carey in the bookstore the other day. The cover and blurb made me want to read it and I almost bought it, then realized that it's a sequel to Santa Olivia. So I looked for Santa Olivia and found the only copy on the shelf. Bought it, meant to read it after Monk and St.Crow's latest novels, but ended up opening the book Sunday night, and could not put it down. So interesting that I almost didn't do this post. It's taking time out from reading Santa Olivia. I am halfway through it already! And look at that cover - sexy. If I leaned that way, I would totally hit that. LOL (that was weird, wasn't it? especially coming from a grandma. Shame on me, mwhahahaha). Now I regret not buying Saints Astray. I'm probably going to have to wait, since we're going into that whole no more book buying for myself season - have to concentrate on X-mas gifts from now on.....or do I? Hoping for some book gift cards from the offspring. Ironically, I read her first Kushiel book and liked it, though I haven't felt the need to buy the others. Didn't enjoy that particular style of storytelling as much as I'm enjoying Santa Olivia.

up next?

Next up will be one of these three - Black Blood by John Meaney (no 2 of the Tristopolis novels); Magic On The Line by Devon Monk (bittersweet almost to the end of the series); and last but certainly not least, Reckoning by Lili St. Crow - aka Lilith Saint Crow (another bittersweet since this is the final novel of the Strange Angels series). After that? who knows. I know I've been meaning to read Kelly Meding's novels, and now there are three more to read; and Kelly Gay's novels, now numbering three. The novel world is passing me by since I can't read fast enough to keep up. And to think that way back in 2007 I was seriously suffering from a lack of interesting books to read. I know that Urban Fantasy has been evolving since 1992 or so, but even up until the early 2000's, it was easy to keep right on top of all the seriously GOOD urban fantasy novels that were being published. I was reading a mix of SciFi and Urban fantasy, and regular fantasy and running out of novels to read. In the late 1990's and early 2000's I had times when I could not find anything interesting to read in my preferred genre, and had to resort to re-reading favorites or trying out -shudder - paranormal romance....(shudders again). 2007 is when I happened upon Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews (and now there are 2 series by them), and then in 2008 when I grabbed -by impulse again- Grimspace by Ann Aguirre. Both of those books were grabbed by me on a shopping trip when I couldn't find anything to interest me, and each of those books were impulse buys and now look at what's available. Sure, there are and were a lot of what I consider Eh - Meh books, but there are so many good novels coming out, and have come out that I'm having trouble keeping up with my reading along with family life, work, sleep and Cityville! LOL At least I know there's always something laying around here for me to read. :)