Strong Female Protagonist Book One, by Brennan Lee Mulligan (Author), Molly Ostertag (Artist)

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This book was recommended by several people, and I’m glad I read it! I’m not a huge reader of graphic novels – I like them, but I also like a lot of words in my books and sometimes graphic novels shortchange words for cool pictures. This book had both! And on the bottom margin of many pages were short, snarky sentences referencing the action or the pictures drawn. That made it all the more fun! It felt like the author was talking to me as we read the book together.

From Amazon:

“With superstrength and invulnerability, Alison Green used to be one of the most powerful superheroes around. Fighting crime with other teenagers under the alter ego Mega Girl was fun — until an encounter with Menace, her mind-reading arch enemy, showed her evidence of a sinister conspiracy, and suddenly battling giant robots didn’t seem so important. Now Alison is going to college and trying to find ways to help the world while still getting to class on time. It’s impossible to escape the past, however, and everyone has their own idea of what it means to be a hero….”

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How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You by Matthew Inman (The Oatmeal) will make any cat owner laugh and then pause with concern as they tally up the number of “warning signs” their cat actually displays. These “warning signs” include: Excessive shoveling of kitty litter (practice for burying bodies), sleeping on your electronics (trying to disrupt all communications to the outside world), or hiding in dark places and watching you (this is to study you in your natural habitat).  I enjoyed most of the comics, laughing out loud at some of them, and definitely recommend this book to anyone that is a fan of cats.

From Goodreads: “If your cat is kneading you, that’s not a sign of affection. Your cat is actually checking your internal organs for weakness. If your cat brings you a dead animal, this isn’t a gift. It’s a warning. How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You is an offering of cat comics, facts, and instructional guides from the creative wonderland at TheOatmeal.com.”

The Hypothetical Girl, by  Elizabeth Cohen

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This is a book of short stories – good for reading when you only want to have a short reading, or only have a few minutes available. Each story is about some sort of love or dating situations in today’s electronic world of meeting people. (I’ve been married a long time, and have not been dating; so it’s interesting to read about all this newfangled dating and strategies for meeting people!)

From Amazon:

“Love meets technology with a dash of quirk in this collection of highly original short stories
 
An aspiring actress meets an Icelandic Yak farmer on a matchmaking Web site. An online forum for cancer support turns into a love triangle for an English professor, a Canadian fisherman, and an elementary school teacher living in Japan. A deer and a polar bear flirt via Skype. In The Hypothetical Girl a menagerie of characters graze and jockey, play and hook up in the online dating world with mixed and sometimes dark results. Flirting and communicating in chat rooms, through texts, e-mails, and IMs, they grope their way through a virtual maze of potential mates, falling in and out of what they think and hope may be true love.

With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird. The Hypothetical Girl captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection.”

We love to read books, and to talk about books. Check out our entire series here! Need more book chatting and suggestions in your life? Listen to our Books and Beverages podcast!

I had never heard of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and found it on a booklist that recommended positive, upbeat books and am definitely enjoying it so far! I had it on hold at the library and the woman in line next to me got very excited when she saw the title and soon all of us at the desk were chatting about the book, so it does come highly recommended 🙂

The book takes place after World War II and is all correspondence between  the characters. The main character is an author named Juliet and her letters are funny and descriptive, and make you wish you knew her in real life. Learning about the challenges in London and Britain itself after the war is definitely interesting as well. Juliet enters into correspondence with a male book-lover who is a farmer on the island of Guernsey, and through him she learns about the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which began during the German occupation of the island. It is a quick, enjoyable read and I’m trying to make it last as long as I can!

“Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb….

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.”

About the Author, by John Colapinto

This one was a pretty light fun book. An aspiring author who doesn’t actually write, because it’s hard (a very common type of aspiring writer) stumbles into a wonderful manuscript. He submits it as his own, assuming nothing at all could go wrong. Of course, wackiness ensues. It’s a fairly cliche story, but there are enough interesting details that it still is fun enough to read!

From Goodreads:

“Cal Cunninghman has always fantasized about being a novelist. But at twenty-five, he’s far from realizing his dream. Newly arrived in Manhattan, he toils as a bookstore stockboy, lives in a dire neighborhood, and never seems to write anything. How curious, then, that Cal should shortly publish a rollicking autobiographical novel that shoots to the top of bestseller lists and sells to the movies for a million dollars.

About the Author is Cal’s first-person account of how he achieved this remarkable feat. A mysterious roommate, a timely bike accident, and the rapacious literary agent Blackie Yaeger all play a role in Cal’s success. Deception, blackmail and murder all play a role in Cal’s desperate bid to hold onto that success.

Reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith’s gripping “Ripley” novels, About the Author is a wickedly funny psychological thriller that not only casts a knowing eye on the excesses of the current Manhattan publishing world, but touches on deeper themes of literary envy, identity, guilt, and the fatal difference between reality and imagination. “