Caroline Bartels > Recent Status Updates

Finished the first installment, The Girl on the Baggage Truck. I love his writing! Will start and finish the second one by tonight or tomorrow. I should have brought it with me on this weekend as I would already be half way done with it by now.

Not done yet but I just hit the line in the section The Real Wherever when Alison muses: if you play it right, it can teach you things about yourself you can’t learn the other 358 days of the year... and I can’t tell if the author is trying to be ironic or if she is an idiot and things that there are only 359 days in a year.

When a book references a song that wasn’t written until 12 years after it is set, the writer hasn’t done her homework. I’m reading an old advanced copy of this so perhaps it was fixed, but now I’m so annoyed that I don’t want to finish it. And her editor hopefully caught this or he/she should be fired.

I’m rather stunned by how good this book is. Adichie’s writing is so compelling, and I find myself going back to passages that are hard to shake off.

I can’t — this dialect is so distracting. I tried to just replace it all as I am reading it, and that helped, but way too much for a story — based on reviews — that i don’t think is going to give me that great of a pay off. Giving up on this — life is too short for poorly written books.

Why the first person like this? It feels gimmicky and it is distracting from the story!

Giving up on this one. I feel like I’m reading the same passage over and over again.

Really liking this, and more than half way through after just one day, but my biggest pet peeve about YA literature — and I have many — is the constant use of the first person narrative, as if teenagers can only relate to literature if it is coming from the “I” perspective, and then the need to abandon all proper use of I and me, as if no teenagers out there use I and me properly. It just makes me cringe!

Trying to figure out what others saw in this. Dull as dirt. I found myself skimming quite a bit, just so I could finish it and move on.

Trying to figure out what others saw in this. Dull as dirt. I found myself skimming quite a bit, just so I could finish it and move on.