books 25 and 26

yes! i'm one-third of the way to my goal. and with all these YA novels i'm reading to pad the list... i just might make it.

better than running at night, hilary frank
rating:
i'm taking a break from rating right now. it's too much pressure.

i loved this book. the YA librarian i'm working with this summer sent me home on friday with a big stack of recommended reading and this one sounded good so i started with it. i pretty much couldn't put it down, which is a really awesome feeling when it's saturday afternoon and you finally don't have all kinds of ridiculous other things to worry about for the first time in a few months. it's about ellie, who used to be a goth and then changed her outlook and decided to go to art school. she meets a guy right away and embarks on this affair with him and he turns out to be an ass and she learns from it. my favorite kind of young adult novel, the kind where bad things happen, but they're normal bad things, and you're not left feeling like there's just no way that these 7800 terrible things could actually converge in one person's life in one week. if you haven't read much YA, you probably have no idea what i'm talking about. but if you ever saw that show touched by an angel, maybe you do.


the partly cloudy patriot, sarah vowell
rating:
see above

i was worried that this book would be a little too snappy for me, but i'm into american history and narrative non-fiction so i shelled out a dollar for it at the SCALA booksale anyway. i enjoyed it, and it was a nice break from fiction. sometimes i'm not really sure that i understand what point vowell wants to make in a particular essay, but it never really bothered me much. there's so much in this book that's funny in a really bittersweet way, like bush quotes from the 2000 presidential debates and such.