Once Upon a Read-a-Thon Update

Hope everyone has been enjoying the Once Upon a Read-a-Thon!  Thank you to everyone who entered our mini challenge!  It has been so much fun reading through all of your awesome answers!  You guys picked fantastic favorite couples and such fun crossover couples!  Our internet connection has been inexplicably wonky these past two days, but it seems to be working again at the moment and I can't wait to read through the rest of your responses!  If you haven't entered our mini challenge yet, you still have until 11:59 PM tonight to do so.  :-)

Speaking of mini challenges, here are my responses to a few of the other read-a-thon challenges:

1.  Jenn at Book Crazy asked us to pick our favorite book and/or character and pair it with a song and/or photo that reminds us of the person or setting in the book.
Frances Hardinge's The Lost Conspiracy is one of my new favorite books and this picture strongly reminds me of the volcanic jungle setting:

 (photo credit goes to my BFF who snapped this beautiful fern-filled photo in Hawaii)

2.  Amanda at Not-Really-Southern Vamp Chick asked us to select six random books off our shelves (or use the books in our read-a-thon piles), take the first sentences from them, and use them to come up with the best four-sentence opening paragraph to a book that we could manage.  My entry:  

No one knew for certain when the trouble started at the Colgan school.  Camille clicked the latches down on her trunk and glanced out her bedroom window.   Flames shot high, turning the night lurid with carnival light.  The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning.  

My four sentences are from:
1. Heist Society by Ally Carter
2. Everlasting by Angie Frazier
3. Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause
4. Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith

3.  Jessica at Confessions of a Bookaholic asked us to tell her what makes us most emotional when we are reading a book & which books have made us the most emotional.  

Death makes me more emotional than any other plot element.  Aside from that, characters living through torturous circumstances can make me ache with frustration, anger, or sadness on their behalf.  (WARNING : Spoilers ahead if you have not read Charlotte's Web, The House of Mirth, Jude the Obscure, The Hunger Games, Fire, Blood Promise, Spirit Bound, or City of Ashes)

A few specific scenes that made me cry:

1.  Charlotte's death in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web.  (I am physically incapable of reading that scene aloud because every word of it makes me bawl.  Just thinking about that scene makes me misty-eyed.)

2. The end of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.  

3. The murder/suicide of the children in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

4. Rue's death in The Hunger Games.

A few books that made me emotional (aka miserable in a way that I secretly love):

1. Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series.   (The end of City of Ashes: "I'll just be your brother from now on" = me gnashing my teeth and whimpering in frustration.)

2. Kristin Cashore's Fire  

3. Richelle Mead's Blood Promise & Spirit Bound