Books!

I have been pretty busy throughout my vacation so far - shameful, but I think I was working really hard and feeling so stressed at the end of the semester that it's felt really good to take a breather, albeit and extended, longer-than-I-should-allow-myself one.  So far I have read a couple of good books, and I am well into my third.

Dracula: the Bram Stoker one.  I enjoyed it; I've always had this thing for vampires (well before Twilight), but I have never read the original story.  One of my friends gave it to me as a gift quite awhile back, and I finally got around to reading it.  I have to admit that I'm glad that I read a lot of it while on vacation and sharing a room with my mom because it was a little creepy.  But it was also full of brave characters and good conquering evil and gender stereotypes from the time, which I also liked.

Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.  Juvenile fiction.  It was a very quick read (I could have easily kept reading all the way through, but I finally made myself go to bed and split it into a couple of days).  The story is written as letters between two cousins in Victorian England times.  I learned after reading it that it seems the authors wrote the book as a game.  They wrote actual letters to each other - one as one character, the other as the other, I believe.  And they didn't talk plot hardly at all, which sounds neat.  Cool idea, and it turned into something fun and entertaining to read.

These is My Words, by Nancy E. Turner.  Maybe you've already read it, as I think it's kind of popular.  I'm only somewhere around the middle of it, but, man!, am I enjoying it.  It is written as the journal of a woman who lived in the Arizona territories in the late nineteenth century.  I believe it is based on an actual woman, and I want to know how much is true because it's quite the sensational story so far.

Anyway, I recommend all of the books.  I'm looking forward to reading more before the summer's over (which is in one month for me - boo!), and I feel almost justified because I am a reviewer for a friend's website (although someone already did These is . . ., I think).