Good morning! This is Candace from Beth Fish Reads hanging out here at Book Journey. Although I don’t always comment, I rarely forget to pop over to check out what Sheila is up to—and Morning Meandering is the best way to see what she has going on. As you already know, Sheila is currently halfway around the world visiting one of the places I’ve always wanted to see: Australia.
I can’t tell you why I have a soft spot for Australia or why I’m drawn to books set there. Maybe it’s the exotic wildlife, the sense of wilderness, or the beauty of the land. In any case, as I’m thinking of Sheila’s adventures Down Under, I’m reminded of some of my favorite books set in Australia.
In no particular order here are two books and two series that I loved, loved, loved:
Who hasn’t read the Thorn Birds saga by Colleen McCullough? If you haven’t, then get yourself to the bookstore immediately. Forbidden love, family drama, and almost sixty years on a sheep station in the heart of Australia: this novel has it all.
So you think you want to visit Australia? After reading Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, you might end up with mixed feelings. The beauty of the outback is definitely tempered by a multitude of dangers. Bryson’s humor and the stories of his adventures as he travels throughout the country are not to be missed.
John Marsden wrote my all-time favorite alternate history books set Down Under. The Tomorrow series (Tomorrow When the War Began, etc.) and the Ellie Chronicles (While I Live, etc.) together consist of ten action-packed, gut-wrenching, beautifully written novels of a group of teens who are forced to survive on their own after Australia is invaded by an outside enemy. Seriously good books (and great audios!).
A Book you might not have known was set in Australia: Jo Nesbo’s The Bat, the first in the Harry Hole series.
Two terrific Australian authors: Liane Moriarty (The Husband’s Secret, etc.) and Shaun Tan (Lost & Found, etc.).
Okay, Sheila, your trip may have an end, but your adventures in Australia have only just begun. Hope you find something here to take you back to your fabulous vacation.
Jem Barbary spent most of his early life picking pockets for a wily old crook named Sarah Pickles—until she betrayed him. Now Jem wants revenge, but first he needs a new job. Luckily Alfred the bogler, the man who kills the child-eating monsters that hide in the shadows of Victorian London, needs a new apprentice. As more and more orphans disappear under mysterious circumstances, Alfred, Jem, and Birdie find themselves waging an underground war in a city where science clashes with superstition and monsters lurk in every alley.
This is a fun Middle Grade (MG) read of life on the street, and these young people, Jem, and Birdie, make there way by searching out bogles. This book (or listen in my case) reminded me a bit of the Bloody Jack series. Told in a strong accent that is fun and I think would engage young listeners, A Plaque of Bogles would be excellent for a family road trip.
Hi all! Elizabeth here from Silver’s Reviews. Sheila and I met at the BEA in 2013 entirely by a wonderful accident. Yes…accidents can be wonderful at times. 🙂
We were discussing via e-mail before the BEA that we hopefully would run into each other but highly unlikely so we weren’t counting on it, but lo and behold we did meet.
Sheila and I were in line for the Book Bloggers Conference along with hundreds of other bloggers, and we just happened to be next to each other as we made our way into the line. We started chatting and introducing ourselves and laughed when we found out who each of us was. I loved it and so did Sheila.
Sheila has a wonderful blog that makes you want to read EVERY book she has read, but there is no way I can do that nor can I keep up with her activities. Sheila has so many activities and does so much she makes me tired. 🙂 Sheila has a fantastic personality and smile that is very inviting.
I want to live in Minnesota so I can be in her book club. 🙂 That is one lucky book club to have Sheila in it. The Brainerd Library also is one lucky library to have Sheila involved.
I could look around Sheila’s blog ALL day and still not be tired of looking around. Sheila has posts that pull you in and make you want to come back. The sign of a great blogger.
I know Sheila loves HUGE mugs of coffee so I thought I would join in with a photo of my favorite mug and mug shot. 🙂
Hi! This is Florinda from The 3 R’s Blog enjoying a cup of coffee at Book Journey. I’m glad Sheila invited me to be one of her blog-sitters while she’s on a real-life journey of her own, although I’m more than a little envious she gets to go to Australia.
I’ve known Sheila and Book Journey for so long I can’t actually remember when we first “met” virtually, but I absolutely remember meeting her in person for the first time in New York City during the week of Book Expo 2011. That was my first time at BEA, but not my last, and hanging out with Sheila has been one of the highlights of every visit there–because if you know how much fun she is on her blog, you can just imagine what she’s like in person!
Knowing Sheila has influenced me in two major ways: as an audiobook reader, and as a reader/re-reader of Banned Books. The annual celebration of Banned Books Week is one of my favorite features at Book Journey, and I’ve joined in several times. In 2012, we both posted reviews of the often-challenged YA novel The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. It was a re-read for me, and I said:
“My recollection was that The Chocolate War was a pretty dark novel, and it certainly is, but its dystopian world is that of the contemporary high school–and at almost forty years old, it barely feels dated at all. In fact, its bullying theme may be, sadly, even more timely now. Cormier’s characterizations aren’t terribly complex, but his adolescent boys behave believably. The novel’s plotting is tight and the tension rarely lets up. There’s a good deal of violence here, both psychological and physical…The Chocolate War is chilling, unsettling, and very true to life, and I can see many reasons why it’s frequently challenged, It’s also a defining work of young-adult fiction that needs to be read and discussed for many years to come.”
“Can you say we have a winner? The Chocolate War is the portrayal of a dystopian type world where you just need to fall in line with what you are told to do… (think Pink Floyd, The Wall video). When Jerry comes on the scene and at first is bullied into not selling the chocolates like everyone else and then decided to not sell at all.. things get pretty crazy in this book.
“Bullying is a strong theme throughout the book, and not just the physical kind – and not just from the students…. really the book is powerful and sad but really made an impact on me. I am so glad I read it.”
(This is just one of the hundreds of reviews you’ll find in Book Journey’s review archives–go take a look, and see what books you and Sheila have in common!)
Banned Books Week 2015 will take place the week of September 27-October 3. I’m sure Sheila will be observing it here at Book Journey, and I’m marking my calendar now so I have some reading planned for it–you might want to do the same! Till then, thanks for Meandering with me today!
Hazel and her friend Carlene headed a murder mystery Book Club group that met in members homes. They would read cozy mysteries set in a certain location and then all join in the meeting to discuss what they read over coffee, tea, and tasty treats.
Imagine Hazel’s surprise when at one such meeting at Carlene’s home, Carlene takes a sip of her tea and collapses in her chair, dead, with a suicide note next to where she has collapsed. Hazel is skeptical… Carlene had just spent a lot of money on a spa weekend and having her hair done… who does that before planning to check out for good? Plus Carlene was way more of a “setting the scene” type gal… she would more likely have planned a suicide in her own bed wearing her best nightgown and robe with her hair beautifully spread out around the pillow… not like this, not with foam hanging from her open mouth.
As Hazel starts to look more closely at each of the groups members she discovers more than she bargained for. She discovers secrets that Carlene had worked hard to hide… and more than one person in the group would have motives to take her out for good.
Cozy mysteries are not really my thing. While if you suspend reality they can be fun to read, I rarely pick one up. I find I have to many questions… too many things that can slide in these books that I think, “no, no it could not have possibly happened that way,”…
However… if you add the words “Book Group” in a title, it could be a dictionary on book clubs and I would want to read it.
Murder At The Book Group was a fun change from my normal reads. The murder, happening during the groups regular book club meeting puts them all as suspects. It was not like their now dearly departed hostess was a great person… she actually had many flaws and many people had reason not to like her. In fact, the more Hazel digs into what happened, the more she finds out how truly unlikable Carlene was.
I did enjoy the book, I probably will never be a big cozy mystery fan but the occasion dip into these fun reads works for me.
Hello! Judith from Leswammes’ Blog here, sitting in at Book Journey. Well, let’s have a look…snoop…snoop… Sheila’s got SO many posts on her blog; how many books has she read? And it’s not just about books; she seems to live the life of two people, always so busy!
Although I’ve never met her, through her posts I’ve got the feeling I know Sheila a bit. And I’m happy to look after her books blog, while she is away (did you know she has a room full of books, a personal library? Wow indeed!).
Ah here, look: The Summerhouse by Jude Deveraux. This is one of Sheila’s favorite books and her post about it made me want to read it, too. It’s a great book about what-ifs: what if you could change your past? What would your current life be like? I loved the stories of the three friends who all go back to their pasts. A great idea for a story. Here is my review.
Oh, and look at this: The Passage by Justin Cronin. I loved that book (my review), and so did Sheila. Yes, I’m not really one for vampires, but this was such a great, epic read! We both didn’t love the sequel, The Twelve, quite so much (in fact, I didn’t even finish it while Sheila still enjoyed it).
Yeah, Sheila’s got good taste! We ‘met’ through her “It’s Monday” meme, more than four years ago (closer to five!!). Through this meme, I got to know a large part of the blogging universe. It’s a great meme for a starting blogger to meet up with new bloggers, but also for established bloggers to see what their blogging friends are up to.
But I really l♥ve Book Journey because of the Morning Meanderings. I’m amazed how Sheila can find time to post about her life almost every morning (and have a life interesting enough to write about every day!).
Could you fill a blog post every day about your life? I could, but only if I copied the same post on most days. What about you: Are your days groundhog days or Sheila days?
I grew up on VC Andrews books…. in fact last year, my first book of the year was the first book in this series, Flowers In The Attic. I reread it because the movie was coming out and I wanted to have the story line fresh in my head. Recently, I discovered that Petals On The Wind (the second book) was now a movie as well. I rented it and …
~Sheila
To bring you up to speed… Flowers in the attic is about four children that are placed in the attic of their very rich grandparents home and kept there for two years due to their mother marrying a man who was practically her brother and the grandmother saying the children were the devil’s spawn. When the children’s father is killed in a car accident, the mother has no choice but to return to her childhood home which she hated, looking for help to survive. The grandmother allows her to stay with stipulations, in order for the mother to get her inheritance, the now sickly grandfather was never to know that children were born of this union. The children must be kept hidden until the grandfather’s passing. Thus… the attic.
In the attic, are the two older siblings, Chris and Cathy (who are in their upper teenage years), and the twins Cory and Carrie, who are 5 when they enter the attic. Basically, the over closeness of the children causes the two older siblings to become a little too close, and in the mother’s twisted obsession with her inheritance, she tries, and succeeds in poisoning one of her children, Cory dies at the age of 6.
Flash forward to the Grandfather dying, and the mother has now met a man who also has money and she has told him that she was unable to have children. While the children are now to be set free of the attic, their mother has instead abandoned them to the care (ha ha) of their cruel grandmother. The children finally escape out an attic window…
Ok…
In Petals On The Wind, now Chris and Cathy are adults living with their younger sibling Carrie (who is in her mid teens). Chris is learning to be a doctor, and Cathy is performing in the ballet. In the movie we are missing how they got from point A to point B, which is that they were discovered while on the run by a maid who took them to where she was employed and after the children shared their true story with her employer, he took them all in. He was a doctor, and put Chris in medical school, Cathy in ballet school, and Carrie in a private school. At the opening of this movie, the man who took them in has passed away. There is much straying from the book at this point so from here I will go with the movie version…
Chris and Cathy are still very fond of each other, and while Chris does not want any other woman, Cathy knows she needs to move on from her improper love of her brother. She meets a man in the ballet who promises her advancement, and she moves in with him. Hurt, Chris meets a girl at the hospital he in interning at (his bosses daughter), and begins to date her.
Oh if only things could have remained that way…. Cathy finds herself in an abusive relationship as her new man in jealous and a drinker. When her younger sister Carrie asks to move in with them, things get worse. Chris meanwhile feeling pressured, has asked his girlfriend to marry him, although he knows he is still in love with his sister.
Think all that is twisted? You haven’t heard nothin’ yet…
SO the movie. I was impressed. I have not reread this book so had little recollection of all the details of the book to go on. (I read a synopsis today to remind me of the book, and then I picked up on all the differences between book and movie). While it is not accurate to the book, it has the same bones. I found myself totally engaged with the story line. The acting was wonderful, I actually found this movie to be better than Flowers In The Attic (although you really do need to watch both to get the full story).
I have to say I loved these books as a teenager but do not remember them being so uhhh…. graphic. It is funny now to think that I read these books all those years ago when even by today’s standards they would be considered… risky.
I do recommend the movie to those of us who know the books. I think they are a wonderful compliment to the original story and add a whole new twist of creepy when you see it played out on the screen. If you have not read the book… I recommend them. There are 5 books in the series and I do not recall if I went beyond the third, If There Be Thorns or not. Perhaps someday I will need to look at this series again.
Good morning! The last official Morning Meandering before I head out to catch my flight this afternoon for Australia. Crazy wild sentence there. Even I am like… WHAT?
About a week ago I sent an email to several of the bloggers who frequent this space and/or I know from years of blogging and asked them if they would possibly be able to take a little time out of their already packed schedules and write a Morning Meandering for me. The criteria was: I would love for it to be something from my archives, and maybe something on how we “met”. Or they could choose their own topic. My timing was horrible. Fresh off the busy holiday season I did not think many would say yes, and in my email I let them know that I totally understood if they were too busy and on such short notice…
and then almost all said yes.
*humbled blogger here*
So… starting tomorrow some of my blogger friends are going to take over the Morning Meanderings. You will probably know them and if you don’t, you should. They are AWESOME. They wrote some pretty interesting and informative posts and a few are quite funny. I hope you will check in on them and I hope you will visit their blogs as well.
As for what will be “read worthy” in my carry on for this trip…
I will be gone 17 days. Yup. My flight from LA to Sydney Australia is 15 hours. Yup. I will be getting on a cruise ship on the 10th – 22nd. My reading is:
Walking The Bible – Book Club Read for Harper Collins
Belong To Me – Book Club read for Harper Collins
13 Things Mentally Strong People Do
Harry Potter – Goblets Of Fire (Re-Read along… continues, no matter where I am 🙂 )
and on Kindle I have loaded:
Ticker (ooh I love that cover!)
Night School: Genesis
Lane Changes
Doctor Death
Murder At The Book Club (finishing)
The Aviators Wife (finishing)
There is more, but you get it… I am ready for reading. 🙂
In real life real-time… I am up early. I still have a list of things to do. I left too much to yesterday. Everywhere I went I ran into people I knew and that added an additional 30+ minutes to each stop. By the time I got home after lunch with my son, pedicure/manicure, picking up medication, shopping for house, shopping for trip, pants for Al, picking up dinner, picking up make up… it was 5:30 pm. Now I am doing laundry, writing out checks that need to go out, emails, notes for the house sitter, prepping posts, run up town, bank stop,call vet, and verify my cell phone for international…
yeah.
I do plan on posting reviews if I have internet and I will pop in as I can. Thanks everyone for reading Book Journey!
Hello! Welcome to It’s Monday What Are You Reading? The meme that we use to share what we read this past week and what our plans are for the upcoming week. It’s a great way to see what others are reading and add to your own To Be Read list. 😀 You never know where that next great read may come from!
Happy First Monday of the New Year!!! Can you believe it? I was just thinking that I took over this meme in February 2010. That is a LOT of Mondays. 🙂
This week has been cra-zay. New Years came and went and I am preparing (still) to leave tomorrow morning for Australia. Yup. Australia. Yeah… I am freaking out too. So here is what I posted this week:
What a week! SO this is what I have been doing instead of packing! As for the next week, tomorrow morning I will post what I am taking with me for books but I have no idea at this point what I will be reading. I still need to download audio books to my phone… gah… how did time get away from me?
I have posts planned for while I am away so please pop in… some fellow blogger buddies have agreed to pop in with a post and I have read what they have written and it is pretty good stuff. I will post reviews as I can, not sure if I will always have internet service but we will see. *whew* I feel like I need one more day to prepare 🙂
Please add your It’s Monday! Post below where it says click here.
Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…
For those who read mainly children and middle grade books please add your link here as well:
On a snowy night, an actor collapses during a play. A man rushes from the audience to help him. A young girl witnesses it all. A caregiver weeps because she is so much more. A relationship is ending it just doesn’t know how. And around the world a flu is rushing through the air like pollen and the next 48 hours are the end of the world as we know it.
There are no phones. No television. No cars or buses or planes. No internet. No Facebook. No updated status. All communication to the rest of the world, if there is a rest of the world, has
stopped.
Whew. Station Eleven was the book I chose for my first book to read in 2015. I had read reviews, seen this book on the best of the year lists, and honestly could hardy wait to dive into the book.
Station Eleven is an extremely entwined dystopian novel of the world taken out by a flu virus that leaves only 1% of the population in its wake. The book focuses around the actor, his life, his wives, and the people who surrounded him. As the book goes on, you see that our main characters have all been connected to the actor in some way. The book flashes back to before the flu, and then to present time, where the years started over to One after the epidemic. It is now year Twenty. At times I do not like flash backs, but it works here. Kirsten, who was the little girl in the play, is now part of a Traveling Symphony that travels to areas where people are and the group performs Shakespeare. She is obsessed with all things about the actor who died the night before the flu outbreak, collecting whenever she can find them – magazine articles, newspaper clippings, and she has copies of the two graphic comic books that the actors first wife had created, the first one called Station Eleven.
Sound complicated? It is and it isn’t. There is much to love about this book. The threat of a world-wide flu obviously works and puts the fear factor in the novel. It is written in a unique way which I love, centered around a Traveling Symphony that merely plays for their passion for Shakespeare and music (and really… what else are you going to do in this new world?), there is also a group at an airport that have been there since their plane emergency landed there that twenty years ago. There is a group at a hotel that have taken over rooms as their homes and live as normal a life as they can. And there is a Prophet. A scary man who believes that those who survived the virus are chosen by God and he takes whatever he wants… whenever he wants… food, ammunition, women, and lives.
There is a moment towards the end… an “aha moment” that impressed me when I put a key plot together. I did not see it coming. I was impressed.
But… and I do hate but’s…
There are things I did not enjoy. After the beginning and the big flu scare… the rest of the book is fairly mellow. Any “crisis” is wrapped up too quickly and too neatly. The fear of this new world… is not much. There is also the fact that as you read you have to wonder why some of these groups did not do more… why did the group stay at the airport all that time? I get that they were scared at first to venture out, but after a few months/years wouldn’t you go out and see what is happening? And the book left me feeling there should have been more. I knew as I was reaching the final pages that there was no way this book could wrap up all the loose ends. I then thought that since this book had the same title at the first graphic novel in Kirsten’s possession that surely there must be a plan for a follow-up novel with the title of the second one…. but as of this writing, I seen no signs that the author has plans for a second book.
Hmmmm.
This review is longer than I had planned because there was much to say. I did like the book. Very much. I do think it needed more action. More scare. Yet I did devourer it as it is unique and I do love unique reads. I am glad I chose it for my first book of the year. If there is no more to this story, then it is one that leaves you with a lot to think about as far as what happened next, and maybe, that is the way the author intended it to be.
Dystopian lovers will enjoy this read and I do recommend it.
Ok, I think we need a spoiler page on this one. I want to talk about the book 🙂
Hardcover: 352 pages
Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (September 9, 2014)
In no particular order here are two books and two series that I loved, loved, loved:
tempered by a multitude of dangers. Bryson’s humor and the stories of his adventures as he travels throughout the country are not to be missed.
John Marsden wrote my all-time favorite alternate history books set Down Under. The Tomorrow series (Tomorrow When the War Began, etc.) and the Ellie Chronicles (While I Live, etc.) together consist of ten action-packed, gut-wrenching, beautifully written novels of a group of teens who are forced to survive on their own after Australia is invaded by an outside enemy. Seriously good books (and great audios!).
Book Journey 