More to come this week...

I hope everyone has been enjoying the holiday season!  I had quite a week.  Last Sunday I drove to Las Vegas with my husband for his sister's wedding.  We got back on Wednesday and by Christmas Eve I had come down with some cold/flu/nastiness that I am trying to get rid of right now.  Since I am currently in a cold drug induces haze I don't think I am going to be accomplishing much. 

I was hoping to have more posted about my outings but I'll try to get my act together by the end of the week just in time for my....wait for it...wait for it...

Harry Potter themed New Year's party!!

Yes I know I am totally geeking out right now and I love it.  I have cooked up some pretty awesome things for this party which I will be sharing later but in the mean time I will leave you with one picture from my sister-in-law's wedding. 

My nephew (who turns 5 tomorrow) was the ring bearer and looked so adorable in his tux but he did need something to distract his attention during part of the reception.  Well, I just so happened to have a random app on my phone that let you decorate a picture with Christmas decorations and he loved playing with this app but for some reason thought it was hilarious when he covered up his own face...

Me and my nephew, he thought I looked better with some sweet pink glasses and he looked better with an ornament over his face

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

The Graveyard Book
By Neil Gaiman

What is there to say except I HEART NEIL GAIMAN!! When I first heard of him I didn’t understand how people could be so obsessed. Then, I read Neverwhere and began to understand but I love him even more after The Graveyard Book. The funny thing is that when I think about the story I can’t even really place what makes me love him. It could be quotes like:

“You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Pg298

That may be part of it, I just know that every time I close one of his books, whether for a moment, or after the final page, I feel a giddy, delightful connection. You would think I would feel sad to let go of the characters, but I don’t. I think I said something similar at the end of Neverwhere.

One of the most interesting things to me was that while reading I kept thinking about Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Neffenegger. The graveyard and ghosts all felt familiar and my feelings while reading both were very similar. Then, I got to the end of the book and under the “acknowledgments” Gaiman talks about Neffenegger.

“A lot of what she told me crept into Chapters Six and Seven.”
Pg 311

This may seem like more of a review on Neil Gaiman than a review of the Graveyard Book but if you haven’t read him yet, DO! If you need a place to start, The Graveyard Book is wonderful. What more do you really need to know?

**Source: Much love to my local library for having this book available for me!

Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page.

Thank you Jenny Q at Let Them Read Books for hosting this month's Mailbox Monday blog tour.

Check out her blog and post all the new books you acquired last week.

 Across the Universe by Beth Revis (ARC from publisher)

From author's website:

Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awake on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into a brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.
Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship—tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn’t do something soon, her parents will be next.
Now, Amy must race to unlock Godspeed’s hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there’s only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

 Wither (The Chemical Garden Trilogy) by Lauren DeStefano (ARC from publisher)

 From Good Reads:

What if you knew exactly when you would die?

Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb—males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.

When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape—to find her twin brother and go home.

But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limted time she has left.