The Great Joy of Book Fairs

Yesterday was a great day in the world of KP The Reader. My school was holding its annual book fair, and, during a break between classes, I popped over there to have a look. On top of the sheer pleasure of being in a room with hundreds of books (which is really a reward in and of itself, right?), I was overjoyed to pick up three or four things off my "To-Read" list, including the next two books in the Redwall series, for which I've just written a review, plus four or five other titles, for $20.00. I even picked up a recent release, Bone Orchard, which I had been intending to read anyway, in hardcover for $6.00. I love hardcovers but I don't tend to actually pay full price for them, just because it seems silly to pay so much more for the same story just to get a different cover on it, so it was really nice to be able to get a hardcover for the price of a paperback.

I also managed to find both an advance reader copy and an unedited proof, one of which was of a book that I had been intending to read anyway, so I was quite excited about that (always neat to have something other than the standard paperback edition, isn't it?). Overall, it was a great day at the book fair, and I was very happy that I took the time to pop in and have a look! So glad that my school takes the time to organize this event every year.

Preliminary Thoughts on This Year's Book Challenge

I started a 75 Book Challenge on LibraryThing on a whim this year, not knowing whether or not I would be able to complete it and not knowing the effect it would have on me. I had never done a book challenge before and 75 seemed like a pretty attainable goal if I worked at it. Now, with the year drawing to a close, and my number of read books resting at 47, I thought I would just take a moment to reflect on what doing the challenge has meant for me this year.

Review of Martin The Warrior (Redwall #6) by Brian Jacques

Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought that Martin the Warrior was, as a whole, gorgeous. It's nearly a five-star piece of work for me, certainly. Oh, man, a book has not made me feel this many feelings at once in a long time, so it's possible that my review won't follow a completely logical course, but I'll do my best, starting with the things I really enjoyed.

(If you have read the book and probably survived the attendant onslaught of feelings, feel free to pop right over to my Goodreads review in order to see all of the spoiler-y bits in which I talk about certain important plot points. Otherwise, spoilers are covered up here, so you're safe.)

Mid-Reading Thoughts and a Slight Rant on Martin the Warrior (Redwall #6) by Brian Jacques

Let me just get the small rant out of the way first, seeing as I would like to move on to my thoughts about this book (which, by the way, is quite good):

Why would anyone put this on the back of the book...

...if Martin the Warrior is not, in fact, the first book in the series? The first one happens to be Redwall, which is listed as the seventh book on the back of Martin the Warrior. The annoying thing is, I not only own Redwall but had a sneaking suspicion that it was, because of its title, probably the first one in the series. I get that, listed the way that they are here, they follow a more chronological order in terms of the story itself (Martin the Warrior happened before Redwall Abbey was built, apparently), but Redwall was the first to be published. Isn't it better for people coming to the series decades after it was first published to read the books in the same order they were read by the first people to pick it up? Isn't it weird for new readers to read the series differently? I suppose I understand why this new order is provided, considering that it is a children's series and it might make more sense to children if they read the stories in the order that they "happened" as opposed to the order in which they were published, but the reader in me feels slightly sinful now that it knows it's reading books "out of order" in terms of publication. Now, with the semi-rant out of the way, on to the mid-reading evaluation of Martin the Warrior!

What Do You Do When Someone Recommends a Book to You and You're Afraid it Will Be Terrible?

I find myself facing a dilemma at the moment: I made use of Goodreads' recommendation request feature (excellent tool, by the way, right up there with LibraryThing's tagmash), asking, admittedly, for something rather obscure and specific. The one point upon which I insisted was this: please, please, no YA romances. I thought that specifying that would keep me out of this situation, but, apparently, it hasn't, and I now find myself struggling to decide whether or not I actually want to read a book.