Stephenie Meyer does adults

I know, this is my third post about something Stephenie Meyer has written. I am not obsessed, I promise.

But I just finished (well started, and then finished in the course of a day) The Host, her first novel for adults.

The book is about an Earth where parasitic aliens have taken over and take control of people's bodies. It's the story of one alien and her human "host."

For the first hundred pages of so I was really not into this book. I kept almost giving up on it, but decided I would read at least to page 100. The next thing I knew, I was on page 230 and totally hooked.

It's a little more science fiction-y than I am generally into and than her other books have been, but it's an engrossing story and a fast read, especially for a long book.

If you have liked the Twilight series, I think it's definitely worth trying, although you may have to give it a few chapters.

Can I be British?

What is it about British chick lit? It is somehow so much more interesting than its American counterpart (not that I don't enjoy the American version as well).

Still, there's something about their shops, food, and strange spelling (e.g. apologise) that I just can't get enough of.

My latest discovery? The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne. So fun, it's main character starts a business where she helps men do things like shop and throw parties and just generally whips them into shape. Plus it's the first in a series, which I always enjoy.

Do try it, perhaps with a cup of tea, and you will not regret it.

I make bad movie choices

I have had no luck with my weekend movie picks lately.

I wanted to blame Netflix for their going-through-a-dry-spell choices, but I think the blame has to be mine.

In trying to chose movies that both my husband and I will enjoy, I seem to be ending up with ones no one likes.

This weeks less than stellar picks?

Borat. I didn't really think I would like it (it looked WAY too cringe-y), but I felt like everyone else in the world had already seen it and we should too. The result? So awkward and really not all that funny.

Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns. I like Tyler Perry's movies because they are filled with such pretty people. This one was no exception. But it was lacking in suspense. Would the hard-working, but struggling single mom end up with the completely perfect man who was in love with her from the second he met her? Would she? Would she? Well...yes, obviously.

Perhaps next weekend I will do better.

I love foodie books

It's no secret that I love chick lit. But I have a special place in my heart for chick lit that talks about food.

Although I am not much of a cook, I love food. I like to watch people make it and even better, to read about it.

So I especially enjoyed Sarah Strohmeyer's Sweet Love. It's the story of a woman whose mother is trying to get her together with her first love. She does this by arranging for them to take a cooking class together.

There's a nice story, some romance, and a lot of talk about cooking and eating desserts.

Be warned, I was forced to consume a lot of chocolate through the course of this book so I could keep up with the characters.

Curl up with Audrey

Enjoying Audrey Hepburn is a cliche, I know.

I don't even know that I am so enamoured with her, since I often find her characters a little mannered and irritating (Holly Golightly). But I do love her movies. She's so lovely, and they are always fun to watch.

I recently enjoyed three back to back when I got the Audrey Hepburn Collection (from the library, even).

This included Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, and Sabrina. This was actually my first watching of Sabrina, which is, I realize, shocking. I thoroughly enjoyed it, although Humphrey Bogart is a less than ideal leading man for her.

All wonderful and filled with good clothes.

Katie Fforde is lovely

I first met Katie Fforde and her books years and years ago. I was living in London for a summer and read Stately Pursuits, and completely fell in love with it and her.

It is everything chick lit should be - fun and romantic and well written and British to boot.

I have enjoyed all of her books since then and spent part of this week curled up with Bidding for Love.

So enjoyable I did not want to stop reading it. City girl moves to the country, find new life, meets interesting people, and falls in love. It's the comfy mac and cheese of books.

A word of caution for readers - the object of her affection? Her cousin. I know. They're supposed to be "distant cousins" but it still kind of skeeved me out the whole time.

Yay! The Hills is back!

I am no stranger to reality television. Such trashy, fluffy fun, for the most part. But I have a special love for The Hills, whose new season returned on Monday.

I find the whole show completely addictive, and am oddly obsessed with Lauren Conrad. I literally buy any magazine with her on it. Why? I cannot explain for the life of me.

The show isn't even all the interesting. Yet I am somehow very invested in rooting for Lauren and against the always evil and vacuous Heidi and Spencer.

Try it and you'll be hooked, in the best possible way.

You can even watch the old seasons on DVD. What fun!

Another day, another new series

Another new supernatural series is always a find, and luckily they seem to keep appearing before me.

This time it begins with Succubus Blues by Richelle Mead, who has written some other books that I have enjoyed.

The main character is, as you might think, a succubus who works for the devil. Still, she's pretty likeable and has adventures, crushes, interactions with demons, etc.

This book was entertaining. Not a must read, but I will still probably get the next one.

Weekend movie recap

Another Monday, another weekend spent watching questionable movies.

First up was 10,000 BC. I felt like I had heard people say this movie was good, but it's possible, in retrospect, that I was hallucinating. It may be my own fault. I'm not really a fan of the tracking people down for the final big battle movies and this was definitely one of them. Plus the people were hard to tell apart with everyone sporting BC dreads. Not my cup of tea.


Then I watched Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (I know, I had such high standards this weekend). It was pretty much exactly what you would expect. It had the wonder that is Neal Patrick Harris, but other than that was pretty much drug and bathroom jokes.

Love, love this book

Literacy and Longing in L.A., by Jennifer Kaufman was so good that it took me weeks to read it. It was like having a really expensive box of chocolates. I parceled it out a couple pages at a time because I knew once I really committed to it it would be over and I would be sad to be done with it.

Why was it so great? I have to admit that I love books about readers. When the main character said, towards the beginning of the novel "I collect new books the way my girlfriends buy designer handbags. Sometimes, I just like to know I have them and actually reading them is beside the point. Not that I don't eventually end up reading them one by one. I do. But the mere act of buying them makes me happy - the world is more promising, more fulfilling."

As someone with a whole bookcase devoted to books I've bought but not yet read (with more piled n the floor beside it) I could relate and couldn't help but love the narrator.

Books play such a huge role in my life that I like to read about other people who feel the same way.

I loved this book and was, in fact, sad when I finished.

New York, New York

I recently stumbled on the book A Match Made on Madison by Dee Davis.

It is the story of a New York matchmaker trying to set up one of the city's most eligible bachelors. Along the way there are the usual high jinks, misunderstandings, and romantic entanglements.

The book was surprisingly good. The plot was interesting and the characters were likable. I found it a little too self-consciously New York-y though. Each chapter starts with a description of a Manhattan landmark which the heroine then visits. You live in New York, I get it, move on.

That aside, it was a good read.

Gorging on Lifetime movies

I have been Tivo-ing Lifetime movies non stop lately.

Yesterday I watched two of them.

First up was The Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal. Texas? Cheerleaders? Scandal? What's not to like?


Basically these girls were bad to the bone cheerleaders (drinking! sex! being rude!) who met their match in their couch and Lifetime movie heroine. They did not, however, get the comeuppance smack down I was hoping for.



I also watched Poison Ivy: The Secret Society. This one had an innocent girl (from Iowa, of course) who was lured into a secret society. These girls were slutty and murder-y, as I assume all secret society members are. In the end our heroine prevailed, sort of.


What have I learned from all these films? I was right not to ever be much of a joiner. It only ends in tears.

School loans are a pain - take up counting cards

I was vaguely excited to watch 21. Why? I don't know, good cast, Jim Sturgess is cute, and it seemed like a relatively interesting plot.

And, yet....

Both Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth were exceptionally uncute. Plus I found the characters annoying (just get a loan to go to medical school like the rest of us...you don't have to count cards in Vegas!) and what happened to Kevin Spacey? Wasn't he once delightful and not all icky?

In the end, you sort of just wanted things to end badly for them and it was hard to feel too bad when it did (oh no! your ill-gotten money that you stuffed in your roof got stolen? how tragic!).

I guess I just like more heroes.

The Twilight saga is a less good Harry Potter

So I have already blogged about my love for Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series. I was, of course, thrilled, when the librarian put the fourth and final book into my hot little hands and ran home to read and read.

Breaking Dawn is good, which is no surprise, and definitely worth reading. After all, how could you skip it? It's the last book! Don't you want to see what happens? Of course.

But, of the four it was probably my least favorite, which was a little disappointing.

I felt like the author rushed to tie everything up neatly, and that there was a lot of build up that all really amounted to nothing.

Maybe she needed another book? I don't know, but I was bummed that it hadn't been as good as the others.

The Olympics are oddly like heroin

While Leisure Girls enjoys many kinds of television entertainment, I am beyond not a sports person. Other than faking interest when I was first dating someone ("I LOVE football!") I can happily go my whole life without watching any sporting events, the Superbowl included.

And, in the past, this disinterest has included the Olympics. Un-American? Perhaps, but I just didn't find any of it that interesting.

I have now spent 80% of the last weekend watching the Olympics, and it seems like the more I watch, the more I want to see. I cannot at all explain this phenomenon, but I do know what I will be doing tonight.

When teen movies go bad

I think we can all agree that it's not really reasonable to rent the movie Step Up 2: The Streets and then be surprised when it's not very good. Especially since I had already seen the first movie, which was also not much of a winner, and the likelihood that this one would be better, or even as good, was pretty slim.

But teen movies have an oddly catnip like quality for me, so watch it I did.

And, it didn't disappoint, as long as your expectations were very, very, very low.

On the plus side, the dancing was very cool, and that was a good 60% of the movie.

The characters were poorly written and badly acted and neither charismatic or interesting. The plot, such as it was, was dull and predictable.

I will admit, however, that I ended up fast forwarding quite a bit as the film wore on, so it's possible that I missed several bon mots and plot twists. I doubt it, though.

Still, if you want to see lots of people spin around on their heads, look no further.

Second tier reading

As we all know, there are books and then there are books. Even while I tend to avoid anything too heavy, some books are a lot meatier, more involving and affecting. Some are like tiny snacks which, while enjoyable, are quickly read and forgotten.

I read quite a bit of both kinds, and I still enjoy the more snack size fare, even though I get through them quickly (and often while the TV is on in the background).

I have just finished two of these kinds of books.

Insider Dating by Jennifer O'Connell is about a woman who wants to create a database about men in Boston so women can know what they're getting into when they date them. It's a somewhat heavy handed story of someone with daddy issues who eventually learns to love.

I also just read Confessions of an Ex-Girlfriend by Lynda Curnyn. I have to admit, I started wondering halfway through if I had read this book already. On the downside, this book is clearly not all that memorable, but on the upside I was willing to read it again.

The main character in this story is recovering from a break-up and it bonding with girlfriends/dating/learning to love herself/etc.

Both of these stories are good, especially if you want something especially mindless.

At least I can count on someone

After being recently disappointed by an author I thought I liked, I was very glad to be able to enjoy Jane Green's The Beach House. I have liked all of her other books, and this one is no exception.

It takes place at the beach, which I always love since it makes me feel all vacation-y and adds to the escapist summer reading feel.

It's one of those character driven, follow various people and their stories as they intersect and are eventually resolved books that are so often found in women's literature, but you generally like everyone in it and want to see things work out well for them.

The characters are great, and it has just the right amount of intrigue, romance, and gossip-y-ness. Plus I promise a happy ending for pretty much everyone involved.

Amnesia is fun

I can only assume that there are zillions of people who have had amnesia wandering around and I, through some fluke, have yet to meet one. That is the only way I can explain the fact that it is such a prevalent problem in books and movies.

Questionable premise aside, Remember Me? by Sophie Kinsella is a great read.

I have consistently loved her other books, especially her Shopoholic series (despite its occasional cringe-y-ness) and was so pleased to find this book was no exception.

The main character wakes up with no memory of the last three years. She has to figure out her new life and the person she is and decide where she wants to go from there.

Enjoyable and recommended.

Vacation movie watching

Never one to be without a DVD player, Leisure Girl found time while in the DR to watch two movies.

Penelope was lovely. It has that fairy tale-esque quality that I love in any kind of entertainment. The people were all cute and it had the happy ending I require from everything in my life.

Jumper, on the other hand? Not so much. For a movie about people who can jump anywhere in the world, it was surprisingly dull. Hayden Christensen reminds me so much of Ryan Phillipe that I was surprised in each scene it wasn't him. His character is smug and self satisfied and quite unlikeable. And, two hours later, nothing had really happened and he movie was over. Definitely not recommended.