Guest Blogger: Stacy from Longtime Lover of Literature

For the first time ever, Peace Love Books is having a guest blogger! I'm so excited to introduce Stacy from Longtime Lover of Literature to all of you! Stacy is here to share with us a little about herself and her blog, along with a review of one of the books she's recently finished. So give a warm welcome to Stacy!

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Hello to everyone reading here at Peace Love Books! My name is Stacy and Jessica has been kind enough to let me come and write a guest post here on the blog and tell y’all a little bit about myself and what I’m attempting to accomplish this year.

National Public Radio, also known as NPR, takes a survey every year on books from different genres and what people classify as their favorites. I was scrolling through twitter one afternoon and saw that John Green had posted a link to 2012’s NPR Top 100 Young Adult Lit Books. I was intrigued and clicked the list and after getting through it realized I had read around 30 of the books on the list so far and had heard of many of the others but hadn’t gotten around to reading them. I suddenly had the desire to finish the list.

At first it started out as something only for myself, I would read the book and then start onto the next one, that is until I realized that I really needed a way to keep all of my thoughts about these books clear and written down to look back on when the entire list was completely read. After posting a few blog entries and telling a few friends I was suddenly getting a lot of interested readers who wanted to see what I was doing. From there, Longtime Lover of Literature was born.

I gave myself a deadline of one year to finish the 100 books (August 2013 is the completion goal) and told myself that I would also re-read all of the books that I had already completed. Now you may be thinking, 100 books in a one-year period, are you crazy? Well sure, crazy for books!

It’s been about half of the year now and I’m at almost 40 reviews completed and am picking up speed from here. I have come across many books that I am so glad to have found, that are being added to my favorites list. Then I have also come across books that I was really not into, but that’s the joy of the project… I never know what I’m going to get!

Below this I have included the book review that I posted today, after finishing the book Delirium by Lauren Oliver. It has been one of the my favorites of the entire project so far!

I hope that you are intrigued by the idea and would like to hear more of my reviews and see how I come full circle and finish this goal. It’s always been a passion of mine to read and write and I hope that by doing this I can inspire more people to want to do the same.

Thanks for reading and please stop on by and feel free to ask me any questions or let me know what you think of the books on the list!

-Stacy @ Longtime Lover of Literature

#52- Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Rating-9/10

I was looking for an easy read for the plane ride home from Florida (I went this week, check the last blog post for details if you have no idea what i'm talking about) and looking through the list realized that I had read this book the first time on my way to Vegas and it seemed only appropriate that the second time around would also be after a vacation! Also here's a fun fact... Lena, the main character, and myself share a birthday! (September 3rd)

Delirium is a book set in the future, where love has been labeled a disease, amor deliria nervosa, shortened to... you guessed it... delirium. It was decided that love was a sickness and the government took over and bombed areas of the city where it was extremely bad and then changed laws and made rules to make sure that the delirium never spread again. When someone turns 18 they have a surgery that affects their brain and takes away any feelings of love. There are still some people who resist this, people who lived in the bombed areas of the world past the fences, called the wilds. Love is a bad word and is never to be used or felt again. Our narrator, Lena, is a 17 year old girl who has always wanted the cure. After seeing how her mother and sister suffered from love she has been counting down the days until she is set to be safe.

That is, until the summer before she turns 18, when she meets Alex. A mysterious boy who makes her question everything that she knows about life, love, and herself. We follow Alex, Lena, and her best friend Hanna through the summer right before their entire lives are set to change. Will the disease end up ruining them? Or will they realize that it was the cure that was setting them up for failure all along.

I really enjoyed this book, both times around. I read so many books that sometimes its impossible to remember the plot twists and characters after a while and since it had been a year since i've read it I still found myself wondering what was happening next. I really enjoyed the idea of the novel and found extreme humor in how they explained why love was a disease. It was all true. Rapid heart rate, sweating, difficulty focusing, reduced mental awareness, extreme euphoria, the list goes on and on. I had to agree with all of the things that classified love as a disease. I also loved that once we knew the symptoms we were able to feel through them with Lena and realize that even though it was a disease, love is the best kind of disease to have.

I loved the characters and felt that Lena had a great voice to be the main narrator, but I also really really liked Alex. He is someone that I wish I could hang out with in real life and see what he had to say about the world we live in now. 

I have recently been really conflicted when it comes to my love life and for those reasons I really enjoyed the first stage of the disease and found myself laughing when I realized I could define all of these symptoms to my life. Especially the reduced mental awareness and difficulty focusing. I dont think I speak only for myself when I say that I seriously second guess and think about things over and over and over again when it comes to the person I like.

I am really excited to read the rest of these books, even more excited that the sequel is out and the final book of the trilogy is out in a month! I think I will be breaking my whole, reading nothing but the 100 books project because I need to finish this trilogy.

“Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”

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Thanks so much for being here Stacy and sharing a little bit about your project! For more information on Stacy and the NPR list, check out these sites: 

NPR's 100 Best Teen Novels List

Stacey's Finished Reviews