Hello all you CollegeCandy bookworms! If you missed the post last week, we are starting up our very own book club. Each month, we will select a novel (using your suggestions, of course!) and then meet back here on the last Saturday of that month to discuss it. Without further ado, I’d like to announce that the inaugural pick of the CollegeCandy Book Club is… Read More »

Calling all CollegeCandy-reading bookworms out there. It’s been a blast reviewing books for you for the past few years, but we’ve recently decided to change things up a bit. I’ve been getting book recommendations from you guys since the dawn of the Saturday Read series and I’m finally going to do something about it, by starting the CollegeCandy Book Club. What does that mean?

Read More »

[There are over 100 million sites on the Internet. 100 million! You might think you know about all the important ones (CollegeCandy, Gmail, Google, Facebook…), but there are thousands of other sweet sites out there (like Spreezio, Teach Parents Tech and We Are Hunted) and more showing up every day! We get it – it’s not easy or fun sifting through the crap and porn to find those gems, so we’re gonna bring the gems to you. Just sit back, kick up those feet and allow us to introduce you to the diamonds in the internet rough.]

If you’re an avid reader and book-lover like I am, your bookshelf is probably crammed with dozens of books. Mine is filled with several of my favorites, of course, but also dozens of old textbooks and cheap paperbacks I have never even opened probably won’t ever read again. Books that have been packed and moved and unpacked 6 times in the last 4 years. In my never-ending quest to get organized (and spend less money on moving boxes), I’ve decided to do something about all the books that I don’t use and are just sitting there collecting dust.

Of course I considered selling them or donating them, but I’ve discovered something better: swapping them.

PaperBackSwap is an online “book club,” where members can exchange books they’ve already read with other members. Read More »

I am a HUGE fan of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” (the book, not the movie) so when I found out that after 6 years, Audrey Niffenegger was releasing another novel, I knew I had to get my paws on it. Luckily, my anniversary with my boyfriend coincided beautifully with the release date, so, needless to say, I received it as a gift (good job, Tyler!).

Anyways, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” as you can imply from the title, focuses on pairs. In the novel, Elspeth Noblin has died from leukemia and left her flat in London and the majority of her belongings to her mirror-image twin nieces, Valentina and Julia, whom she has never met. They are the children of her twin sister, Edie, and right from the beginning you are made aware that they have not spoken to each other in 21 years. Niffenegger hints at the tension between the sisters and that it has something to do with Edie’s husband Jack, but doesn’t reveal the secret until much, much later.

Julia and Valentina are a bit lost living in the US with their parents; they continually enroll and then drop out of post-secondary institutions and have an extremely hard time being apart. They decide to move to London to live in their aunt Elspeth’s flat, but it comes with some conditions, including that they must live together in the flat for a year before they can sell it.

The twins move to London and soon meet the other characters in the novel, all of whom seem to function in pairs: Robert Fanshaw, Elspeth’s much younger lover and neighbor, Martin, who has severe OCD and his (literally) absent wife Marijke. Elspeth also continues to be a major player in the novel, only as a ghost. She is able to communicate with anyone in her flat and, eventually, Valentina starts to see Elspeth. Now, Valentina appears to have always struggled with her existence being tied to Julia; she wants to break free and finally do something on her own. She formulates a plan with Elspeth and Robert… and I think that’s all I’m going to say for plot….. Read More »

To be completely honest, after a long week of brain power the last thing I feel like doing in my free time is pleasure reading, however, I have found just the piece of literature to help re-light the spark: Chelsea Handler’s “My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands.”

If you haven’t had the pleasure of witnessing her antics, Chelsea Handler is a complete trip with great material and no shame. I found Chelsea several years ago on the Oxygen Network’s “Girls Behaving Badly”, and from there followed her to the E! Network and caught a few stand-up shows — the rest is history.

So last weekend I picked up Chelsea’s book after many months of putting it off (like I said, reading for fun loses all appeal when you have to read for purpose), and headed to a nearby coffee shop to enjoy my book with a nice cup of coffee.

I have never felt like more of a spaz. I barely made it through the first chapter without literally laughing out loud – as in laughing out loud in the middle of a crowded coffee shop filled with students studying hard, sitting all by myself. Talk about being that girl.

It only took me a few more failed attempts to try and hide my laughing before I decided Chelsea’s book was best read in the privacy of my home, where only my roommates would judge me – and I have a feeling laughing while reading isn’t too high on the list.

I continued the rest of the book — yes, I read the whole thing in one sitting — in the living room with all my roommates, who continually asked me about every five minutes what I was laughing at, (the Jurassic park feet reference killed me.) Needless to say, this book became a cult-classic in my household within a week. Read More »

As an English major, I was always under the impression that literary and popular fiction were genres that were fairly at odds with each other (and, coincidentally, you are supposed to like the former and scoff at the latter. My personal tastes tend to run the opposite way). It’s rare that a book can fit into both categories without the help of Oprah, but oh how I’ve found one.

Audrey Niffeneggar’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife has gained a lot of popularity since it’s 2004 release, making a permanent home in women’s book clubs worldwide because of its earnest and heartbreaking love story. But it’s really so much more than it’s blurb would suggest; it’s also a painstakingly precise, exquisitely written book.

The story is told from the perspectives of Henry and Clare DeTamble, a married couple who have to deal with the complications that have arisen in their lives from Henry’s Chrono-displacement disorder, an ailment that forces Henry to travel through time against his will.

Time travel is usually one of my least favorite genres because it leaves me with too many questions after I’m done watching or reading. Why didn’t the terminator just kill Sarah Conner as a baby? Shouldn’t Marty McFly have known that he was going to succeed at getting his parents back together because if they hadn’t then he wouldn’t be alive to go back to the future in the first place (or even time travel in the first place because Marty essentially tells Doc he would later make the time machine work in Back the Future II?) Stuff like that. I realize that there is a certain amount of suspended belief that one has to assume in entertainment, but it’s still annoying. Read More »