Yep I'm still here.

Life gets in the way once again and delayed me from finishing up my last book in a timely fashion. However, I've finished it now! Yippee!!!!

The Best Tales of Edgar Allen Poe is exactly what it sounds like. A collection of (what the author felt) was Poe's best works separated by categories. At the start of each new category there was a brief explanation as to what the following stories would entail as well as their significance in the timeline of Poe's life. I found that to be most informative as my interest lies not only with his works but with the man himself. Several of the stories were just what I thought they would be based off of the few I had already read in school. They were dark, macabre, chilling, and grotesque.  A few were downright gory (and I loved it!). What I found delightfully surprising was his use of humor to break up the terror of what he was writing about (in most cases death). Also, it turns out he was a great lover of nature and landscape gardening and the last section was devoted to that (my least favorite of the entire collection to be honest). If you want an all-encompassing view of his works then this is definitely the book for you.

Whenever I hear that a film is being adapted from a book I feel a burning desire to snatch up the book and read it. (I'm one of those people that look for inconsistencies in films and chuckle gleefully when I inevitably find them. Deal with it.) So when I found out that one of my favorite actors was going to be in a film called Twelve Years a Slave and that it was based off of a book I made it a priority on my reading list. Twelve Years a Slave is the true account of a black man named Solomon Northup who was born free, kidnapped, and sold into slavery for 12 years. The book came out right after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and reinforced the reality that was slave labor on southern plantations at the time. I have no doubt that I'll find it a riveting (and eyeopening) read.