Halloween Readathon and Winners!

First of all, my apologies for this getting up so late, I've been completely overwhelmed the past couple of weeks and seems like I have fallen behind on EVERYTHING. I didn't read nearly as much as I wanted to and completely missed the Twitter party, but I DID manage to get through 150 pages of Feed by Mira Grant and am absolutely loving it so far. Could end up being my favorite zombie book ever.

And now for the winners...

Winner of my mini challenge is

Lauren from 365 Days Of Reading!

I asked entrants to grab the scariest book they own and leave the opening sentence from it in the comments, Lauren's answer was....

"The scariest book I own is probably Tales and Poems of Poe, an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe's best works (I'm a bit of a wimp, so this is the scariest book I have!).

The opening sentence is this
(From the story The Purloined Letter): At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18--, I was enjoying the two-fold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend, C. Aguste Dupin, in his little black library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33 Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain."

And the winner of the Trick r Treat DVD is...

Jason!

I asked you all to leave a comment with your favorite Halloween tradition and his answer was....

"Halloween has always been one of my favorites. Some of my favorite Halloween Traditions come from when I was younger. As kids (tweens) we would go, after Trick-r-Treating of course, to the cemetery and scare ourselves with scary stories. Right across the cemetery was this old Haunted looking house on a hill. So after the stories we would trick ourselves into believing that we would see scary stuff (blood on the walls, some ghostly image walking in the yard, etc.) When we were done scaring ourselves (and the girls that were with us) we would head back to one of our houses and eat Pumpkin shaped sugar cookies (you know the orange ones) and drink Apple Cider while watching the Fat Albert Halloween Special (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klzt8CgtRlw) and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The weather in WA in October is perfect Fall/Halloween type of weather, which just added to the awesomeness of it all.. Great memories, of some great traditions. =)"

I really enjoyed reading everyone's answers to the questions and added a few new books to my wishlist =) Big thanks to everyone who entered and congrats to the winners!!

Red Notebooks and Romance

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

By: Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

Publication Date: October 26, 2010


From Amazon....

“I’ve left some clues for you.
If you want them, turn the page.
If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.”

So begins the latest whirlwind romance from the New York Times bestselling authors of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on a favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. But is Dash that right guy? Or are Dash and Lily only destined to trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations across New York? Could their in-person selves possibly connect as well as their notebook versions? Or will they be a comic mismatch of disastrous proportions?

Dash and Lily, 16, find themselves on their own in Manhattan at Christmas. Dash is alone by choice–he's told each of his divorced parents that he's spending the holiday with the other, leaving them both to take vacations out of town. Lily's parents are taking the honeymoon they couldn't afford when they got married. They think that Lily is in the capable hands of her older brother, but he's less interested in her than in his new boyfriend, and then he gets sick and spends most of the holiday in bed. He does, however, start in motion the activity that is central to the story. It involves a red Moleskine notebook with a list of literary clues that Lily leaves in the stacks at the Strand bookstore. Bookish and erudite Dash finds it and is intrigued enough to follow Lily's lead and leave some clues of his own. The dares in the book's title refer to innocent things such as going to various crowded places like Macy's and FAO Schwartz to pick up messages. As the dares go on, the teens reveal more and more about themselves in the pages of the notebook, until they finally meet under the worst possible circumstances. While the words, ideas, and sentiments are not those of typical kids, they are not out of the realm of possibility for well-read teens. As they did in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (Knopf, 2006), the authors combine their talents to write an appealing book. It makes readers long to buy a notebook, begin filling its pages, and find a friend who might turn out to be more. This book will spend as much time off the shelf as Lily's notebook.

Rachel Cohn and David Levithan have written a love story that will have readers perusing bookstore shelves, looking and longing for a love (and a red notebook) of their own.

Halloween Costume Mini-Challenge

Whoo...another fun challenge =) Oh My Books!
asked us to make a blog post about what our costume will be for Halloween this year. I absolutely adore dressing up for Halloween and while I'm not 100% positive, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be a rockabilly girl/pinup girl/Bettie Page for Halloween. Sexy, but NOT slutty....cause I absolutely DESPISE the slut suits that pass as costumes.
Anyway, I have the dress already, just need to go find the perfect accessories =)

Oh, and just for fun, here's my pic from last year...I was a flapper! My hair is actually really long, but I flipped it underneath and pinned it for the bob look.

Can't wait to see everyone else's costumes!!

My Spookiest Read

Lesley at Young Adult Books Reviewed put up her mini challenge and asked us to make a blog post about our spookiest read.

I HAVE SO MANY!!!!

So I'm going to go with one that really stuck in my head for a long time...

The Store by Bentley Little...

From Amazon...
Bentley Little is a top craftsman of the horror tale in long form. He has the ability, more unusual than you might think, to imagine 300 to 400 pages' worth of horrific incidents that add up to a long-lasting and powerfully unsettling mood. In The Store Little examines the steadily expanding influence, over all of us, of chain stores. Listen to what one character says: "A lot of these loonies ... are so worried about the federal government, and I never saw a government agency that worked worth a damn. These guys're so afraid of Big Brother and creeping totalitarianism, but our government's always seemed to me to be full of inept bunglers, not brilliant organized master planners. Hell, they couldn't even pull off a third-rate burglary. It's the corporations we have to worry about, I think. They're the ones with the money. They're the ones who can afford to hire the best and the brightest, to competently carry out their plans."

The Store builds paranoia by starting with simple descriptions of the picturesque landscape and the deceptively banal Western town that is Juniper, Arizona. Then The Store arrives. The Store razes a lovely hill to build its huge parking lot. The Store offers well-paying jobs and an astonishing variety of consumer goods. The pattern of delight and worry in the citizens, as The Store spreads its tentacles into local concerns, is believable--disturbingly so. The Store seems like any other of the familiar chains that reproduce like rabbits, invade communities, wipe out small businesses, and turn unique localities into a generic America that looks just the same from Alaska to Florida.

But what exactly goes on, when Samantha and Shannon meet with their boss in the basement of The Store? And who are the Night Managers?

This is dystopia in microcosm. This is horror fiction at its subversive best.

Read this one and I PROMISE you will never look at Wal-Mart the same way.....

Read-A-Thon Mini Challenge!!

It was a dark and stormy night.....

Classic scary book opening sentence, right??? Halloween has got me thinking about my favorite horror novels and one of the scariest I ever read would have to be The Shining by Stephen King. I read it way back when I was a teenager and I can still remember the opening line...."Officious little prick." Of course back then I had no idea what that meant and I can still remember my mom's reaction when I used those very words to describe a classmate. Needless to say, this did not go over well....

So, with opening sentences in mind.....your mission for this challenge is to grab the scariest book you have and leave the opening sentence from it in the comments. Be sure and leave the name of the book and the author too!

Winner will be chosen at random from the comments and will get to choose from any of the 3 books I said I wanted to read for the readathon....

1. Nevermore by Kelly Creagh
2. Feed by Mira Grant
3. The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell

Contest is open to readathon participants only (if you wanna enter, go sign up!)
This contest is international as long as Book Depository ships to wherever you are.
Ends Sunday at midnight.
Good luck and Happy Reading!!

Halloween Readathon Books!!

IT'S ALMOST TIME!!!!

The Halloween Read-A-Thon hosted by Lesley at Young Adult Books Reviewed begins tonight!!!
If you haven't signed up, click the pic to join in...there will be lots of fun mini-challenges and giveaways (I'll be posting mine in just a few hours.)

Books I'm planning on reading include...

Zombies on My Doorstep!!

Not too long ago I won an epic zombie giveaway from NecroScope, the Official Zombie Fiction Review Blog for HorrorScope. I know a lot of you are zombie fans, and if you are, you seriously need to check out this site...it's a zombie lover's dream!!!
Anyway, my goodies came yesterday and I thought I would post up some piccies and show the awesomeness I got, just in time for Halloween!!!

1. Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim by Mark Twain and Bill Czolgosz

2. Dead or Alive by William Harms and Ray Lederer

3. The Complete Idiot's guide to Zombies by Nathan Robert Brown

4. Two issues of After the World, which is Australian zombie pulp fiction....how awesome is that??

5. Issue #1 of the comic George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (swoon)

6. State of Decay by James Knapp

7. And a SIGNED copy of Feed by Mira Grant!!!



Huge, HUGE thanks to the folks at NecroScope!!!!

Halloween Giveaway #1

My favorite time of year is here!!! Yup, Halloween =) TODAY is officially the beginning of the celebration for me. It's the day I pull out all the decorations and start making the house (a little more) creepy for the season...I'll be posting pics of my goodies later and I have some fun stuff planned for you throughout the month but to kick things off I wanna give you a chance to win my favorite Halloween movie of all time....Trick R Treat.

From Amazon....

The doorbell rings, the cry goes out: Trick 'R Treat! But, wait. What's actually going on during this ghostly All Hallows Eve? Something eerie and unexpected. Something splattered and spooky. Something that brings ghouls, vampires and werewolves into the night. Answer the door – a shocking surprise awaits. From producer Bryan Singer (director of X-Men and Superman Returns) and writer-director Michael Dougherty (co-scripter of X2 and Superman Returns) comes a multitale bag of wicked yarns, four cleverly interlocked stories built on Shocktober admonitions like always check the candy and don’t extinguish the jack-o-lantern before midnight. So answer the door now: Experience horror made for today's fright fan.

No other movie, for me, quite captures the spirit of Halloween so brilliantly. The cinematography is GORGEOUS, but don't just take my word for it, check out the trailer...



To enter, just tell me your favorite Halloween tradition in the comments section. (I LOVE pumpkin carving...one year I did a Johnny Depp theme, last year I did "Sam" from this movie =) Please include your email address so I can contact you if you win.

Extra entries as follows...
+1 for being a new follower
+2 for being an old follower
+1 for tweeting
be sure and post the number of entries!

Contest open to US entries and I will be picking a winner on the 15th and shipping via 2 day shipping to make sure it gets to you before Halloween. Good luck!