This book taught me that Henry M. Stanley was both the namesake of Stanley Falls and the originator of the phrase, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"

This book also taught me that in 1968, the world was a very different place. On more than one occasion, Africans are referred to as savages, and often accused of being cannibals. I can't help but feel like this biography would never have been written in the modern day due to its unignorable racist undertones in both the author's writing and the passages written by Stanley himself.

It's an interesting little time capsule, to be sure.

This book combined two things I love (astrology and classic style mysteries) and made both of them so boring that I nearly fell off the elliptical machine while listening to the audiobook.

I don't really know how it happened. I loved hearing Lowell's methods for figuring things out. His group of coworkers and spunky daughter were skilled and very nearly entertaining. The conspiracy around the murder was complex. The suspect was truly wild.

But none of it ever gelled into something that made me care at all about the characters. When the true murderer was revealed I just went "Oh, okay" and that was it. The unnecessary preachiness of several chapters was also tedious. Lewis variously attacks the state lottery, the US legal system, swearing, and shopping without advancing the plot with any of them.

I put this off for years because I didn't think it would match the original. But it does, so read on with abandon, fellow Chocolate-War-admirer.

Cormier is an absolute wizard at writing about what humans are capable of, given the right circumstances. It's depressing and it's real, which makes it all the more depressing.

Thank god this series is over. Never again do I have to suffer Stevens' misuse of words (and in this particular volume's turn at wildly inaccurate inventiveness: "quilled," a word that means to roll into tubes, was used twice when Stevens was describing hair standing on end, as if she thought that because porcupines have quills that you could acceptably turn their body part into a verb). This book, admittedly, did have two scenes that were pretty chilling, but that's about all the good I can say. Amelia is still a blithering idiot. I wish I had counted the number of times during the series that she would think to herself how dumb an idea was and then immediately follow the thought with "I don't know why I sat down / went to him / got in the car." That is not character building -- it's stupidity.

Yet another impossibly drawn out and boring Graveyard Queen book where 95% of the book is Amelia being an idiot and the last 5% is a rushed and uninspired conclusion. And don't even get me started on the typos. Three instances of insure when she should have said ensure, "you look peeked" when she should have said "peaked," and "stone-cold somber" instead of "stone-cold sober" (this wasn't artistic, she was talking about how her wine buzz had worn off). And worst of all, there wasn't even any romance because Devlin wasn't around at all, and despite the fact that he was EXACTLY LIKE DEVLIN, Amelia wasn't interested in the Devlin replacement that fate threw at her.

Being the type of person who loves humor and romance and bizarre things, I am a great lover of xkcd. I bought this book as a Christmas gift for my boyfriend last year and he told me I absolutely had to read it; given that he is not the kind of person to recommend books, I knew it must be good.

Munroe takes questions on his website and uses his vast knowledge of science and his impressive ability to both research and find experts in the field to answer these questions, often in delightfully cheeky and unexpected ways. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a laugh who still wants to learn a thing or two.

But I couldn't give it five stars because of the sections labeled Weird and Worrying Questions. He presents the questions, occasionally without comment, and doesn't answer them because, admittedly, some are quite gruesome. THEY MAY BE WEIRD AND WORRYING BUT HOW AM I GOING TO SLEEP TONIGHT WITHOUT THE ANSWERS, RANDALL.

Something is causing a rash of suicides at the crossroad in Midnight, and the inhabitants need to figure out what is going on and stop it, even as they deal with their normal lives. Harris has reached a point in her writing where she is a master of the big cast and she makes you care about everyone in town so it is easy to follow the sometimes complicated facets of their lives. In turns funny and full of feeling, it is excellent on every page. Love love love.