A note

Hello Russian search engine bots, casual googlers trying to find a book review for a specific book I've happened to read/write one for, and perhaps even nosy people who accessed my blogspot through a different social medium back when I linked to it there:

I just wanted to mention that the HarperCollins strike is in full effect, and as such I will not be reviewing books published by HarperCollins or any of its subsidiaries until the strike is over. (My understanding is that buying HC books is fine, as the strikers/union does not want to deprive the authors of their income.) 

I stand with the HarperCollins workers and hope HC will do the right thing. People deserve to be paid a living wage for their work.

I've been majorly neglecting this blog. I told myself I'd blog on winter break when I had free time, but now that I am/do I don't feel like it. And that's that I have this whole list of things I wanted to write about. I guess I only feel like blogging when I have schoolwork to do.
This last quarter has been the most difficult. I'm glad it's over. So far I've been able to do most of the things I wanted to do on winter break, such as hang out with friends, read books for fun, waste the day on the internet, etc. Good stuff.

Books I've read so far:
-Jane Eyre (4.5/5 stars. If you know me, even just a tiny bit, I don't even have to explain why I love this book so much. It's basically the favorite book of every shy, introverted quiet bookworm girl. I'd actually been reading this slowly throughout the quarter on my Nook.)
-Inheritance, the 4th book in the so-called Eragon Cycle by Christopher Paolini (3/5 stars. I knew I was in for a ride when as early as the second sentence of the preface I wanted to roll my eyes. This wasn't Twilight-horrible, just derivative like the previous ones. You're better off reading the originals [aka LOTR and such].)
-Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style (3.5/5 stars. Rather enjoyable if you're the sort of person who likes style guides [I am]. Tim's voice is great in this but I get the feeling that he and his cowriter don't really get what it's like to be normal people who don't shop at Neiman Marcus.)
-The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop (3.5/5 stars. I remember loving this one when I read it at age nine or so. It was much shorter and basic than I remembered. The selfishness of the protagonist annoyed me.)

Currently reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Gahhh it is so good.

I do love a good pun

Which is not to say my blog's title is one. I'm just way more tolerant of the puns I make than of the ones made by others. As are we all, I'm sure. The tagline ("Random thoughts from my mental hard drive") comes from a book my grandma gave me some years ago. It was the title of one of the chapters and just perfect, I felt, for what my writing usually is.

I've been wanting to start a Blogger account for a while, but I waited until I was on summer break. I have this compulsion to write things down, and while I do have a Tumblr (I haven't figured out how to link to that yet in my Meta post), I find it's best for pictures and other such snapshots of a person's life instead of long rambling text passages, which is what I often feel like writing. I have many thoughts that weigh heavy on my head. (This is the sort of thing I will sometimes write. Consider yourself warned, possibly nonexistant reader.) Writing is one of the best ways, I find, to explain things to myself and to figure out what I really feel or think about something. Thinking long and hard about something is the best/main way I do so, but what I think so often changes; writing it down in words creates some distance that one can use for better examination or analysis. Writing organizes my miscellaneous, random thoughts.