Dallin's Readers' Advisory Blog

1. I am looking for a book by Laurell K. Hamilton. I just read the third book in the Anita Blake series and I can’t figure out which one comes next! The fourth book in Hamilton’s Anita Blake series is The Lunatic Cafe. If you aren’t able to find a copy of that one and you’re dying to keep reading in the series, you can choose any other title in the series if you want to, because each works as a standalone novel as well. 2. What have I read recently? Well, I just finished this great book by Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer. I really liked the way it was written, you know, the way she used language. I wouldn't mind something a bit faster paced though. You might want to try a Margaret Atwood book, as she writes with a similarly lyrical, thought-provoking style, but tends to be more fast-paced than Kingsolver. Or, you could try Love and Ruin by Paula McClain, which is a fast-paced historical fiction/romance, or Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, which is contemporary, richly detailed and des...

I've had a strange journey as a reader. Before my senior year of high school, I almost never read, because I rarely found anything that I believed I would like. But on the occasions that I did choose to read a book, I generally fell in love with it ( Farmer Boy , From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler , and Matilda are still some of my favorites). I also usually ended up loving books required for school. For example, I was required to read Lord of the Flies three times in high school (probably due to some error in curriculum design), and I loved it each time. I read and adored The Scarlett Letter and The Things They Carried in my senior year, and the latter convinced me that I had a special love of literature that I'd never really explored--but by this time I was already 18. As an undergraduate, I decided to do some serious catching-up, and I read almost exclusively classics (Austen, Steinbeck, the Brontës, etc.). I even listened to the 30+ hour book on CD of ...