Thank you to everyone who entered the Nerds Heart YA Giveaway, especially those of you who helped spread the word about this wonderful competition!

The 5 lucky winners are…

• Cathe at Cathe’s Blog
• Chris at Stuff As Dreams Are Made On
• Debbie at Debbie’s World of Books
• Lauren at Shooting Stars Mag
• Jill & Jim at Rhapsody in Books

Congratulations, all! Each winner gets one book, and I’ll try to accommodate any preferences for which one:

• Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
• The Latent Powers of Dylan Fontaine by April Lurie
• Leftovers by Laura Wiess

Winners, you’ll be hearing from me shortly. (And thanks to random.org for picking the winners.)

Next up: I’ll be posting reviews for my Nerds Heart YA bracket. Any guesses which book will win this round?

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Photo by benrybobenry.

Grab a piece of scratch paper and see how you stack up when it comes to your to-be-read (TBR) books!

1. How do you keep track of the books you want to read?
   1. In a spreadsheet.
   2. Piled up by my bed in a Leaning Tower of Books that threatens to topple in the middle of the night and bludgeon me into a different sort of posthumous literary fame.
   3. On paper. Paper never killed anyone.
2. How long do books typically stay on your TBR list/pile?
   1. Are you asking for the mean or the mode? I can give you both.
   2. Um, until I read them?
   3. No more than a few months.
3. What sort of relationship do you have with your TBR list/pile?
   1. Pure unadulterated love—The only thing more fun than the upkeep of my list is actually reading.
   2. Overwhelming—I never leave food out after midnight, but I swear they multiply when I’m not looking.
   3. Love/hate—I love it until I accidentally return a library book with my list stuck in the middle of it.

Scoring: For each “a” answer, you get 3 points. Each “b” is 1 point, and each “c” 2 points.

4 Points or Less: Meg from Little Women
TBR the old-fashioned way has a certain charm. But before your spouse/roommate/cat gets fed up that your TBR piles have spread to the bed/bathroom floor/window ledge, and leaves your sorry, old-fashioned butt, maybe you oughta buy one more bookshelf to house your TBRness.

5–7 Points: Goldilocks
Most of the time, your TBR setup is juuust right. Sure, your dog might chew up your list every now and then, and you might have 17 different lists strewn about the house. But overall, you have a healthy, laidback relationship with your TBR. So just get back to reading, already.

8 Points or More: Hermione Granger
If TBR tracking were an Olympic sport, you would so totally medal. Just don’t admit to any of your bookish friends that sometimes, it’s more fun thinking about what you want to read than it is doing the actual reading.

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Photos by Evil Erin and basykes.

I love writing book reviews. They help me:

• Look smart. I mean, look at how much I read! I must be smart.
• Learn from others. Articulating what I do and don’t like in a book will help me revise my own novel, if I ever get off my ass to do such a thing.
• Practice writing. I haven’t touched my novel since the last day of NaNoWriMo 2008, so I have to do something to keep my fingers limber.

But I’ve started to wonder: Do others get as much out of my reviews as I do? And what, exactly, are they reading for? So tell me…

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Photo by smittenkittenoriginals.