Bossypants is hilarious all the way through, but its best parts were Fey giving us a backstage look at her life getting into SNL, working on SNL, creating 30 Rock, and returning to SNL for Sarah Palin impressions. While there is obviously hyperbole in this biographical info, the sense of pride of being a female in comedy is evident, and made me well with pride too. I can't help but admire the woman.

PS I'm also using "yellow hair" instead of "blonde," too. A joke referenced on a recent episode of Parks & Rec when Fey's bff Amy Poehler refers to herself as "yellow-haired"

I've always liked Anjelica Huston. My parents have a framed Gardens of Stone movie poster with her autograph, since they met her while my dad was a military consultant on the film. This novel is not quite polished, but Huston's vocation is not as a writer. She has some great passages, but overall there was sometimes a stacatto of sentences in a paragraph that didn't quite blend. But the writing is easy to overlook because I loved the peek into her young life. Her legendary father, her beautiful mother, and the way she was raised in Ireland, London, and many exotic vacations. It may not be all that relevant to most, but I found her early life, and especially her relationship with Bob Richardson, fascinating. I eagerly await the second part of her memoir, which is supposed to be released later this year.

The riveting writing and complex characters continue. There's a lot in these novels to guess at and try to figure out along with Katniss - some of them are easy, but sometimes the twists leave you with your jaw hanging open. (Or slightly emotional? Just me?)

I enjoy the dark nature of this series and the push-and-pull of Katniss' narration. She's not a character you always understand or agree with, but that's kind of why I love her. I just keep rooting for her success in surviving - sometimes that's all she can hope for.

A really great collection of short stories; I often had to take a break after finishing a story because I was still thinking about it as I tried to read the next. One particular story stuck with me for so long I had a dream about it... The writing is precise and full of impact; it's wonderfully written. I look forward to reading more by Anne Leigh Parrish.

I'm going to get fangirly in this, and also make a few comparisons to Twilight, just sayin'. It's SO much better. It's long and there are lots of spoilers.

I've decided to unearth my Christopher Pike collection from my parents' basement, and the first book I went to was The Last Vampire, as I just finished reading that other young adult vampire series, Twilight. Basically, it's about 600 fewer pages, and so much more goes on...and the writing is worth a damn.

First, Pike's main character, a 5000-year-old beautiful vampire named Sita narrates the story in a way that explains all that being a vampire entails from kicking ass to living through history and demonstrating that no matter how inhuman she may be, she can still love and care for things and people. She's not unfeeling and murderous. Though, she is a murderer. She relates how she lived in the South during the Civil War and how soldiers roped her up and dragged her through a swamp while talking about what they would do with her later - and how she killed all twenty of them in particularly grueling ways for their treatment of her. During part of the book she pretends to be a high school student (she has looked about 18 years old for 5,000 years), and she almost shoots down a teacher during the gym archery practice because he's sleazy, hits on her, and she knows that he takes advantage of his female students. Basically: SHE KICKS ASS.

And you know what? There's sex. It's not gratuitous but Sita ends up naked a few times - once to wipe off the blood of a few assailants that attacked her, another time to seduce someone who has information she needs. But she doesn't sleep with him then, because she realizes that he reminds her of her husband in her human life, 5,000 years ago in ancient India.

"His remark - so simple, so innocent - pierces me like a dagger. No one in many years has said something as charming as 'I like you' to me. The sentiment is childish, I know, but it is there nevertheless. I reach to kiss him again, knowing this time I am going to squeeze him so tight he will not be able to resist making love to me. But something makes me stop."

Later, she realizes she loves this man, and she does have sex with him because she believes she's going to be assassinated soon (ps she's not THE last vampire). Sex is not a subject that's simply tread on and then avoided in the book, a la Twilight. And it's not something ridiculously gratuitous and offensive - it makes sense. I read these books when I was about twelve or thirteen, and all the sex (and violence, gore, and there's a storyline with a character with AIDS) was nothing that impeded on my morality - something that I simply couldn't take while reading Twilight.

And it's NOT BORING. Reading about Bella made me roll my eyes constantly with how much repetitiveness there was in the writing (stop idolizing Edward please) and how she had absolutely no personality. I think the fact that she was clumsy was supposed to make up for this? No. Sita, on the other hand, is fully drawn and embodies so many traits that make up the vampire she has been for 5,000 years. She is confident, observant, intelligent, caring, thoughtful and her awesome powers as a vampire only enhance these things with more of that kick-assness. Basically: I totally wanted to be Sita when I read this growing up. There's also so much action in the book, that only comes along in Twilight at the end when Meyer realized she probably needed something resembling a plot. The Last Vampire begins with Sita killing a man who has been following her; the story begins rolling from the first sentence, as the mystery opens with an anonymous person who is trying to track her down. She must figure out who it is, and why.

I haven't even talked about the way Pike has used India as a backdrop to Sita's beginnings and the way he infuses the story with Indian lore - like Krishna, whom Sita has met and refers to as a god, and possibly God. It's not so much religion that takes the main stage here, but faith and believing in something even if you believe you have no right to believe in anything.

Of course, this is a young adult novel - you have to take it for what it is in terms of writing and subject matter. This is no great feat in literary history, but it's miles above the drivel that is Twilight. I still love it, and I'm excited to continue the series.

There are many books I've read in my youth that mean something completely different to me today. Whisper of Death's actual meanings changed completely because I never fully understood some of its plot points - I first read it in middle school and then a few times in high school. I always remembered it being one of my favourite Pike books, and maybe that was because it doesn't have a neat, happy ending.

However, there's an overarching storyline about the main character, Roxanne, getting an abortion. And to be sure, the story never gets preachy in any respect, but this is a storyline which had a larger context that I had no clue about in middle school. And so, it almost became more scary when I realized all the implications this time. The story's plot is also very Twilight Zone in the fact that five teenagers wake up to a town with nobody in it - and there's a reason why. Again, like Pike's other young adult books, there's a lot more going on in the heads of these characters, be it Sita's spirituality in The Last Vampire or Roxanne's mystification with the stars and Mars, in this book. Interestingly, Roxanne sees a movie called Season of Passage, which ended up being the title of an adult Pike book years later - about aliens from Mars.

I'm still enjoying my Pike retrospect at twenty-five; it's fun to connect to my younger self.