Much like last year in April of 2011, I read 20 books and didn’t finish an additional 10. That’s a little weirdly coincidental. It also feels again to me like April was really long. Probably because I spent so much of it waiting for appointments with new doctors and dreading them. That’s over now. And was 50% worth the stress and bother. Other than that, I don’t feel like I did much in April. I didn’t do Script Frenzy this year, about which I am quite disappointed in myself. I did garden a lot. A LOT. I’m going to spend most of this month house-sitting. Meh. Let’s get to books. I got a lot this month because I went to the huge SF Public Library book sale at Fort Mason with my mom and she bought me 31 books. Like half of them aren’t for reading, they’re for craft projects, and so far the ones I’ve read have disappointed me unfortunately. Still, I have a lot of books that I am excited about to read still now in May.

Books Read: 20
Books Partially Read: 10
Books Re-read: 3
Books Bought: 0
Money Spent: $0
Books Borrowed: 16
Books Given: 37
Money made (from selling books): $60 in Book ‘Em sales.
Books on To-Be-Read Shelf: 52

Favorite Books This Month: Cinder by Marissa Meyer, Prized by Caragh M. O’Brien, Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi, Partials by Dan Wells, Serenity: Better Days and Other Stories by Joss Whedon, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson, and The Other Guy’s Bride by Connie Brockway.

That is kind of a lot of dystopic novels. Cinder, Prized, Under the Never Sky, and Partials–all dystopias. Cinder and Prized were definitely the best. Cinder is Sailor Moon/Cinderella/Robot! So good.

Prized is the sequel to Birthmarked which was also good but Prized is even better. It’s kind of more an alterna/fantasy world maybe but it’s still dystopic. The main character is a midwife! And she’s run away from this horrible city-state run by a male-authoritarian regime (that’s all in the first book). She stumbles into this sort of old-west, female-authoritarian-run society (in the second) and lives there with them learning science and delivering babies and taking a stand against The Woman.

Under the Never Sky is about a world with two distinct societies–one lives in bio-domes and the other lives out under the Never Sky (basically destroyed atmosphere from bombing from what I could tell). The people outside have “powers” and the people in the bio-domes are kind of evil. The story is about a girl from the bio-dome who gets kicked out because of politics and gets rescued by a cute guy. They go on adventures and learn stuff about their world and each other and themselves. You know, that kind of thing. It’s the first in a series and I liked it.

Partials is about how our civilization made humanoid …androids (?) to fight in our wars and then they rose up against us and a disease that killed a huge percentage of the human population was released. Everyone still alive retreated to Long Island (Yeah.) The story follows a girl who decides to go capture a “Partial” (one of the androids) for study to see if she can find a cure for the disease. There is a lot of science in this book. It was also interesting for me because it’s set about 11 years after the end of the world and my post-apocalypse zombie novel is set 12 years after. It was thought-provoking to read something which had the same problems I came up against with perishable food and gasoline going bad. So on.

Out of these four, I definitely recommend Cinder the most. I might be prejudiced with my huge love of Sailor Moon, but I really feel it was a great story on its own too. I’m really looking forward to the three sequels (rolls eyes. Yeah. One a year.) Delightfully the last in the Birthmarked trilogy comes out in October. I feel confident I can hold out that long.

I wrote about Let’s Pretend already here.

The Other Guy’s Bride is the sequel to As You Desire (which I LOVED). This one is good but not AS good and parts of it are totally copied from As You Desire. But in a complementary, nostalgic, doing it for the fans kind of way. Which is nice and all….but I really wanted something equally amazing in its own way. Still, it’s a romance novel set in Egypt. I liked it.

Lastly, the Serenity one was new to me. I’m not sure how I managed to not read it before but I really didn’t recognize two of the included stories. The last one was familiar and the most boring because Wash was dead in it. Man, I miss Serenity.

Least Favorite Books: Love and Leftovers by Sarah Tregay, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now by Claire LaZebnik, Exorsistah by Claudia Mair Burney, Blue Noon by Scott Westerfeld, and While I Live by John Marsden.

I wrote about While I Live here already and it’s associated penis fixation. I don’t have much else to say about the others except Blue Noon which is is the final in the Midnighters trilogy and I only dislike it because the first one is so good and then the second one is only okay but the third one, it’s like WHAT HAPPENED? It ends so unfinished and so much about it is terrible. Meh. I have to remember this so I never reread them and am disappointed a third time.