Readathon, ya'll

Saturday marks the day of a super special event...Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon. It's the Superbowl for nerds, let's be honest. A whole 24 hours set aside just for reading. Heaven.

I know I won't last the whole 24 hours because A) I am old. B) My eyes are old. C) The boys will be home. D) I have nothing to prove because I. Am. Old.

Seriously though I know I won't make the whole 24 hours but I'll do as much as I can. I want to do more cheering this year. I'll be having the boys read along with me and that will be fun. See what I did there?...keep 'em quiet! :-)

Haven't started a TBR but think that I'll probably pick 2 physical copies and get mostly ebooks. I can read longer on my Kindle.

The best part is that I'm returning as a hostess. It's such an honor and so much fun to be on the main blog and Twitter feed throughout my hostess time. Come join me!

Justin McRoberts, Hawk Nelson and The Afters...LIVE!

The boys and I went to a concert at our church last night. What an incredible night with three great acts.

Justin McRoberts, Hawk Nelson and The Afters were all ah-mazing! We were able to meet the bands afterwards and they were all awesome sauce. #FansForever

  

One of the best parts of the night was listening to The Afters sing Light Up the Sky which is one of my all time favorite songs.

Library Loot

 Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

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Like I said yesterday, I decided to take back all the library books I had checked out and start over. I couldn't decide on a book to read. I ended up finding a few books quickly so I didn't browse around for too long.

I ended up with:

Feed by Mira Grant - this will be a reread for me. I absolutely loved this trilogy the first time around so I'm curious to see if I like it as much now.

Symbiont by Mira Grant - the 2nd book in the Parasite trilogy. This is a chunkster but I really enjoyed the 1st book in the series.

Rot and Ruin by Jonathan Mayberry - the first of a trilogy, I've tried this one before but have always had too many other books to read to get to it.

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith - Rowling did a good job with the 1st book in this series. It's no Harry Potter but I enjoyed it.

Wandering the Shelves

I seem to be having trouble focusing on one book lately. I have so many that look soooo good. I've been reading a few pages of this one and then reading a few pages of that one. To fix my problem, I'm returning everything that I currently have from the library and am going to check out 1 or 2 new ones.

I have a huge clean out of my house going on right now and that includes the ridiculous amount of books that I own. I know that I'll never read some of these so I'm going to pass them on to someone who'll love them.

I'll post my Library Loot tomorrow! Wish me luck wandering the shelves...

Bloggy Business

My reading life has been up and down over the past few months. Sometimes I'm reading every day and sometimes I am hardly reading at all. This lack of reading consistency is a big reason for my lack of blogging - no new books read = no new books to review.

This time around I'm planning to keep it very low key. No schedule, no goals, just posting as I want, as it is fun. I lost part of the fun on my old blog and I don't want that to happen again. I won't be participating in a large number of bookish events. I won't have a Twitter or Facebook profile for my blog - at least not right now. I won't be requesting or accepting review requests since they tend to completely stress me out. Sure, I love getting books in the mail but tracking what needs to be read and when makes for a grumpy me.

I will be posting reviews of most but no all the books that I read. I will be participating in my favorite bookish events - Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon and Bout of Books - for sure and will add others as they work for my schedule and reading interest. I will be visiting my favorite book blogs again and look forward to commenting and interacting with all the great bloggers out there.

I considered having just a general blog again but decided against it. I like having books separate from the rest of my stuff. I might still post a few off topic things but for the most part, I plan to keep it about books.

The name change was obviously a big one. To go from Little Lovely Books to ZombieChaos is quite different. My plan behind Little Lovely Books changed after I originally started the blog so it ended up not being the best name for the types of books I most enjoy reading - zombie, dystopian and apocalyptic.

I'm back but I've moved!

I'm back and am now at my new home...

allthereads.blogspot.com

Come by and say hi!

Please update your bookmarks!

So my plan to reveal my new blog and new URL address was an epic fail. As you can see from the last time I posted here, I haven't been updating. Lots of reasons for this. Since I'm changing the blog name, my littlelovelybooks.com URL will not be renewed when it expires in a couple of months. If you want to stick with me, please change your bookmarks to littlelovelybooks.blogspot.com so that when the URL expires you can still find me.

The Walking Dead Vol 1: Days Gone Bye

Title: The Walking Dead Vol 1: Days Gone Bye
Author: Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore
Pages: 144, paperback
Rating: I loved it!

I picked up a copy of this for Dewey's read-a-thon but left it in the car. When I wanted to read it, it was after midnight and I wasn't going outside in the dark to get it. I wish I had. It was wonderful! I consider this my first graphic novel even though I loved comics as a kid. 

I am a huge fan of the show so to see what it was based off of was really interesting. The illustrations were good and it was such a fun read. I will definitely be picking up more graphic novels in the future.

I loved how the illustrations not only supported the story but in many instances told the story. That's a really different way for me to read a book and I enjoyed it very much.

Our library system doesn't seem to carry very many graphic novels so I'll be on the lookout for them other places for sure.

Patient Zero by Jonathan Mayberry - thoughts on

Title: Patient Zero (Joe Ledger #1)
Author: Jonathan Mayberry
Pages: Kindle, 421
Rating: 4.5 out of 5, I loved it
Source: My own, paperback and Kindle versions

I'm back on a zombie kick and this was the book I started out with for Dewey's readathon. I probably wouldn't start with such a big book in the future but I really enjoyed it. It's about a police officer who is pulled into a top secret government agency. They are trying to stop terrorists from releasing "walkers" to kill everyone.

Although it's all been done before I liked Joe Ledger's character quite a bit. He's a complicated character. He's had a tough life and you feel for him but he's also tough as nails. He's got some great one liners and you know me and my love of all things sarcastic.

I enjoyed the non stop action throughout and thought that the pacing of the plot was well done. Some info dumps along the way but they were probably necessary. The story is quite terrifying because I can totally see this actually happening....that someone would invent a virus that would make people into zombie like creatures that want to kill everything in site.

The only negative that I had with it was the romance. It was light and it wasn't right away but it was too predictable and quite unnecessary in my opinion.

Overall I really loved this one and wanted to read the second in the series right away. That almost never happens so that is saying quite a bit.

Dewey's End of Event Wrap Up

Another excellent event has come and gone. A huge thanks to Andi and Heather for all their hard work, to the cheerleaders for giving encouragement and to everyone - cheerleader or not - who left comments on my blog. I appreciate every single one of them. 

I'm not sure how many readathons I've done. I specifically planned to split my time between reading and visiting others blog while working on my own blog. I also planned several naps throughout. 

I was more interested in the number of pages read. My goal was 700 pages and I read 808. Way more than I thought I'd be able to read. I enjoyed visiting all the blogs that I got to see too. It was fun to see what everyone else was reading and how they were updating their blog. Was a super fun event as always.

1. Which hour was most daunting for you? Around 2 am
2. Could you list a few high-interest books that you think could keep a Reader engaged for next year? I didn't have any of those. Tee hee hee. One of my books was really good but really long (Patient Zero)
3. Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the Read-a-thon next year? No, it was excellent as always!
4. What do you think worked really well in this year’s Read-a-thon? For me personally I loved that a specifically split my time between blogs and reading and that I scheduled in naps.
5. How many books did you read? 3 which is way more than I thought I would.
6. What were the names of the books you read? Patient Zero, How to Win the Game of Business and Notorious Nineteen
7. Which book did you enjoy most? Patient Zero. It was non stop action and I'm back on a zombie kick so it was a good choice. A bit long though.
8. Which did you enjoy least? Notorious Nineteen. I was looking for a fluffy book that I could download right away to my Kindle and that was available from the library. They are so silly.
9. If you were a Cheerleader, do you have any advice for next year’s Cheerleaders? I wasn't officially signed up as a cheerleader this time but my best advice is to open a few tabs at a time and knock them out for a certain period of time and then go back to you reading.
10. How likely are you to participate in the Read-a-thon again? What role would you be likely to take next time? I can't wait to participate again. Hopefully it will fall on an weekend that my boys are at their dad's so that I can fully participate throughout the whole 24 hours. I like splitting my time between reading and visiting blogs so I'll probably sign up as an official cheerleader.