Barnes & Noble Online

Barnes & Noble.com is one of my favorite places to shop online. I wish Longview would get one, but for now the store in Tyler and their online store will just have to meet my needs. When I lived in College Station (Melissa and I would book shop together), Dallas, and Houston ( Big D and H-town alone, of course...well, I had Morgan-the roomie-in Dallas but that was only for 6 months....) I would spend hours looking at books in the store on weekends, after work, or after a run in the park (I wonder why I didn't have a swingin social life while doing the city life thing?). Sometimes when I go to the online bookstore I can smell the store...that's how ridiculously familiar I am with the place. I love to look up books I'm reading or I've read to see what other people thought about them and see if it's what I thought. I also like to go through all the pages of new releases and check out the "coming soon" list. When I go to Barnes & Noble online it's always with the intention of just looking up one book, then I see something cool in the "if you like this, then you will like this...." section and an hour will have flown by without me noticing. They also have this great new feature under "Search" that autofills for you based on what you have typed!!!!! Ahhhhh so wonderful!!! Shawn isn't a book shopper, so any book hounding I do has to be on my own....but that's honestly the only way I would have it. I'm more of a solitary book shopper (unless my co-shopper isn't anxious to leave or a clingy/needy book shopper...it's a tough role to carry out). The best categories are Biography and Historical Fiction, but sometimes I read Young Adult (books like Speak, 13 Reasons Why, and Wintergirls) which end up being the most powerful and thought provoking books (besides any of Sylvia Plath's work, of course). If you haven't read Speak, 13 Reasons Why, or Wintergirls I suggest you read them....you may not have experienced (or known anyone who experienced) the things these girls have, but they are still amazing and you can connect on some level with these girls just from the adolescent experience (provided you are a girl....). Since the weather is on it's way to lovely, scorching summer weather that means I'm catching up on a lot of reading on the back porch. I just finished Echoes (by Maeve Binchy-excellent book, you should read it...funny side note-the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking how similar it seemed to Circle of Friends only to flip to the back cover after the last page and read "author of Circle of Friends") and now I've moved on to Palace Circle to be followed by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Wideacre.....and I fully intend to re-read Anna Karenina (loooooooooooove it) and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath!!!!! If you've never read Sylvia Plath, you should....start with The Bell Jar and the move to her poetry and few short stories.....she is beyond amazing!! In The Bell Jar you have to actually put it down here and there just to bring yourself back to reality....just read it and see! I became a huge fan of Sylvia Plath through a Lit class (American Lit: Civil War-Present) in college that I took randomly b/c it sounded better than Shakespeare and it fit in my schedule for that semester. Ok, the Nerd Alert siren has stopped sounding....you can go back to your former state of peace and quiet. =)