Still and still and still sick

One of the very very few nice things about being as sick as I am is that lying propped up in bed with my computer on my lap, awake for 15-20 minutes at a time — though not, perhaps, conducive to revisions — is very conducive to catching up on this season of Dancing with the Stars.

Why didn’t Amanda Brice make me watch this show a while ago? I remember watching it once in the hospital last May (which was the only good thing about being in the hospital, as both SB and I will tell you) and thinking that it was super fun, what with Apollo Ono (who SB and I decided minorly resembled Brandon) and Ian Zierling and all… but this might be even more fun because… well, Jennie Garth! And Jane Seymour! And Wayne Newton! And on and on and on. I love this show. I think my favorite might be the Cheetah Girl, whose existence I wasn’t even aware of before I saw this show, but she’s totally got moves. SB is just amused that “billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban” is on it. My favorite pro is still Julianne, though. Is it me, or does she look like what Tara Reid might have once looked like?

Also, I skip the “results” shows, except I’m really glad I caught that one scene with Savion Glover dancing. I actually met Savion, back in high school. I took watched him teach a master tap class. I suck at tap. He was Savion Glover. Nuff said.

So the other thing I’ve been doing (besides laying around and groaning and eating black bean soup) is catching up on my enormous TBR pile. I read both Robin Brande’s debut, Evolution, Me, and Other Freak of Nature, and Jennifer Echols’s The Boys Next Door. Both were YA romances, both were excellent, but they had two very different spins. Brande’s book was set against the backdrop of a very high concept, political/religious debate about teaching evolution in high school. Good stuff. I’ve been looking forward to reading this debut for a while and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. As a geology major, an individual of faith, and, oh, a person who has read the news in the past few years, the topic of teaching actual science in a science class is one very near and dear to my heart. I love the way that Brande’s heroine, Mena, despite the trials she was put through by her family, friends and community, never lost sight of her own strong faith.

The Boys Next Store is Echols’s second book (after last year’s Major Crush, which I adored!). Like her last book, this one is set in a small Alabama town, but it follows a motherless tomboy named Lori whose only friends are her older brother and the three boys next door. All five of them work at the marina and go wakeboarding on the lake every day during the summer, but Lori — about to turn 16 — is ready for people to see her as a woman. Her romantic entanglements with the various boys next door is very passionate and very personal. Echols’s strength as a writer is her ability to capture exactly what teen romance feels like. First kisses, first touches, every minutiae of discovering those feelings for the first time. She nails it.