Yes I am here, just a little late this morning. I have been up since 6 am, but I have been reading emails I was too tired to get to last night, chatting it up a bit this morning with bookish peeps on Twitter, and cautiously looking into Pinterest.
Why the caution?
Any one that reads Book Journey on a regular basis knows I have no trouble at all filling up my time. I love to read, to blog, my job, hanging with friends, rollerblading, biking, the gym, volunteering with teen and the homeless, movies, and really…. honestly…
I was afraid (and still am a little) that Pinterest would become a time suck I just could not afford unless I gave up sleeping, which as hard as I like to run…. I do look forward to hitting the pillow at night to re-energize.
Friends invited me to join it, talked about it, I hear it’s praises on the blogs, but for me…. Pinterest was off the table.
And then… (gah… I am really starting to not like those two words…)
Jay at Joy’s Book Blog had a Pinterest Challenge for Bloggiesta. Not one to back down from a challenge I checked it out. What Joy talks about is how to use your blog with Pinterest… in other words, I could connect books on Pinterest that would draw attention to Book Journey.
I do like talking about books…
I did not do the challenge – I did not have time. But I did ask Joy to hook me up with an invite and she did, and this morning… I registered. Anyhoo… that’s why I am really late this morning 😀
Oh yes, you can plan on seeing these pop up in a post as soon as I find a book to theme them… 😀
I am registered but currently there is nothing on my board. I need to figure out how to do it, does it link back to the blog, etc…. maybe this evening I can look more into that and probably in the next day or two I will put up a link on the sidebar. Until then… yeah.
So let the time suck begin. 😛 If you do not hear from me for a while check Pinterest, I may be pinned to a board. “Help! I’ve been pinned and I can not get free!”
My day today is blog post writing, group power, hopefully a bike ride, reading, cooking, and some sort of low-key plan for hubby and I tonight… like a rented movie.
Questions to you: Do you use Pinterest? If so in what ways? (to look up things? What things?) Inquiring minds (ok, me!) want to know.
Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from!
I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. I offer a weekly contest for those who visit 10 or more of the Monday Meme participants and leave a comment telling me how many you visited. **You do not have to have a blog to participate! You receive one entry for every 10 comments, just come back here and tell me how many in the comment area.
It seems like I have been in this book drought for weeks! I just cant seem to fit the books in, but I am making progress slowly. I am close to finishing many so this week I feel there is going to be a breakthrough and a rush of reviews. Seriously. 😀
So that said….
In late 1950s London, something uncanny besets a group of elderly friends: an insinuating voice on the telephone informs each, “Remember you must die.” Their geriatric feathers are soon thoroughly ruffled by these seemingly supernatural phone calls, and in the resulting flurry many old secrets are dusted off. Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.
AH….. the books I would never find on my own! Thank Amy from My Friend Amy for this one!
Loviah “Lovie” French owns a small, high-end dress shop on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Renowned for her taste and discretion, Lovie is the one to whom certain women turn when they need “just the thing” for major life events—baptisms and balls, weddings and funerals—or when they just want to dish in the dressing room. Among the people who depend on Lovie’s confidence are her two best friends since boarding school: Dinah Wainwright and Avis Metcalf.
Outspoken and brimming with confidence, Dinah made a name for herself as a columnist covering the doings of New York’s wealthiest and most fabulous. Shy, proper Avis, in many ways Dinah’s opposite, rose to prominence in the art world with her quiet manners, hard work, and precise judgment. Despite the deep affection they both feel for Lovie, they have been more or less allergic to each other since a minor incident decades earlier that has been remembered and resented with what will prove to be unimaginable consequences.
These uneasy acquaintances become unwillingly bound to each other when Dinah’s favorite son and Avis’s only daughter fall in love and marry. On the surface, Nick and Grace are the perfect match—a playful, romantic, buoyant, and beautiful pair. But their commitment will be strained by time and change: career setbacks, reckless choices, the birth of a child, jealousies, and rumor. At the center of their orbit is Lovie, who knows everyone’s secrets and manages them as wisely as she can. Which is not wisely enough, as things turn out—a fact that will have a shattering effect on all their lives.
I am hoping this one will be good!
“Community, Identity, Stability” is the motto of Aldous Huxley’s utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a “Feelie,” a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today–let’s hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren’t yet to come.
This was in my recent library purchases and was the first comment I drew as a winner… Ryan at My Life In Books chose this for me to read and so… well, I bought it… guess I should try to read it. 😛
From a distance, Michael and Joleen Zarkades seem to have it all: a solid marriage, two exciting careers, and children they adore. But after twelve years together, the couple has lost their way; they are unhappy and edging toward divorce. Then the Iraq war starts. An unexpected deployment will tear their already fragile family apart, sending one of them deep into harm’s way and leaving the other at home, waiting for news. When the worst happens, each must face their darkest fear and fight for the future of their family. An intimate look at the inner landscape of a disintegrating marriage and a dramatic exploration of the price of war on a single American family, Kristin Hannah’s HOME FRONT is a provocative and timely portrait of hope, honor, loss, forgiveness, and the elusive nature of love.
In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.
And the end of this week is Bloggiesta! If you are not signed up, you will want to be!
Add your What Are You Reading to the linky below and I as well as other will try to stop by and see what you are reading! My hours at work drops back to normal this week so I should have more time to get around. 😀
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and those of you who read mainly childrens through YA reads – please also link your post here:
Jake Bergamot is your typical fifteen year old. Scratch that… Jake’s life might be better than average. He lives with both parents who are still in love and married. He has a little sister who is adopted from China. He lives in a nice home in a nice neighborhood and has great friends.
Then one evening after returning home from a party and barely turning down one girls advances, but yes, still turning her down. He turns on his computer and sees that this 8th grade girl, Daisy, has sent him a sexually explicit video, a dance of sorts. Stunned and not sure what to think of this, he forwards the video to his best friend… who of course, sends it on to his friends, and so on and so on…
Within hours the video has gone viral and Jake and his family’s life have been turned upside down. Jake is suspended from school and the students either look at him as a hero (the jocks, the rockers, the stoners) or as a real loser (the preppy girls – and most importantly the girl Jake really likes, Audrey).
Jake’s dad is asked to take a leave from his job just until things settle down, after all who wants to make business deals with the father of a son who is involved in a sex scandal. Sex scandal? All Jake has done is pushed forward on an email…
Jake’s mom takes to avoiding the public. She can’t handle the whispers and instead finds herself in her home day and night, not changing out of her sleep clothes, and really not doing much of anything other than surfing the net on her laptop to see where the story of her son is falling next.
Where will it stop? Will Jake’s momentary lapse of good judgement destroy his family in a world that is all too hung up on media and social networking?
When I initially read the synopsis of this book I knew I wanted to read it. After all, social media is HUGE, and as much as I love being able to Tweet something funny, post a status update on Facebook of where I am having dinner and with who, and texting my friend to meet me at the gym… it also scares me a bit too…. how much is TMI? How desensitized are we becoming when everything and anything is fair game to post for the world to see?
This Beautiful Life started slow for me… I picked it up. I put it down. I picked it up again. The beginning was confusing, didn’t seem to flow and I found myself back tracking to fully understand who these two kids were, why would you name your kid Coco and was she adopted? Did I miss that, oh no – here it is, further in.
And then suddenly, I broke through the books barriers and I was in. I followed Jake to the party, I seen what happened… I understood what happened… and I was with him when he got the email. I even understood why he passes it on… really what 15 year old boy wouldn’t, even if it was for a second opinion from a friend?
For the most part I liked the book and it felt real to me. The few things that stood out that caused me trouble were occasionally it seemed like the narration wondered off into an over described scene that didn’t flow or an odd parental flashback, and I really never felt Coco was a developed character so not really sure why she was there. At times, I forgot about her as the story mainly centers around Jake and his parents.
I feel the book had wonderful potential and hits on an all to real subject. In fact there is a line on page 112 that really made me think..
“Is there an operative shame factor? Or has the internet killed all that? I mean, if everything that’s private goes public, is it still humiliating?”
The ending wrapped up suddenly and quickly. This is a book I will think on for awhile, but I dont have a strong feeling on it now, one way or another. There are parts I thought were extremely well done, and other parts that dont seem complete.
*This review may contain possible unintentional spoilers to the first book, Delirium.
pandemonium is set six months after the first book in this trilogy, Delirium. In a brief recap, Lena was due to receive her procedure that eliminates deliria (feelings of love). Living in a controlled Dystopian society, the government believes that deliria (love) is just messy and people are better off with out it When Lena meets Alex, a boy her own age who had managed to avoid having the procedure done, Lena starts to have second thoughts and a plan is made to escape with Alex.
Now, six months later, pandemonium opens with Lena having survived (barely) to make it to the Wild’s where a small community has formed of those who have not had “the cure”. Outcasts, Intruders as they are called. Lena now has to learn to live in a very different manner and it is going to take all her strength and determination to make a go at this new type of life.
Thrown back and forth between this new world, and the one she came from Lena feels she is living a double life…. which however holds the real Lena’s heart?
Lauren Oliver and I in New York in 2010 (and bonus sssqqquuueeee for Lauren mentioning the Javits Center many times in Pandemonium, which is where BEA is held!)
Ahhh…. pandemonium how I have waited for you! It has been almost a year since I had plunged head first into Delirium which left me with a huge cliffhanger that I wanted to know what would happen next! Pandemonium did not disappoint, taking off right from where Delirium left off I learned quickly that author Lauren Oliver has no problem making the hard choices when it comes to what characters will carry on. Shocked at first (but pleasantly so) by the direction that the book went… I found the more I read I read, the harder it was to put down.
Written in clever alternating chapters of then and now, you read this book in two different times, Lena’s time in the Wild’s from day one, and then an alternate later time where Lena…. well, you will just have to read that yourself. 😀
Highly enjoyable and oh snap if it does not leave me with my mouth hanging open and a smack to the head…. now I have to wait for that third book!
I do have some thoughts I want to share, so yup… I have fueled up and rolled out the Spoiler Button for those who have read this book and want to discuss it further, because…. I do want to talk about it. 🙂
February sailed by didn’t it? With the nice numbers I put up in my January recap, I have to admit I was curious to see where I would land for February. February just felt off…. I felt too busy to read much and too tired to read in the free time I did have. Then I gave up and returned quite a few audio books that I didn’t get into…. total DNF.
So…. how did it line up?
I added 12 books to my 16 in January (Thank God for audio…. seriously!) but added only three new states to the Where Are You Reading Challenge… ugh… already duplicating states! 😯I added no reads outside of the United States.
Of those 12, 6 were audio books. Busy lives people – I am telling you, audio is the fix you need! 😀
2 books into the ebook challenge, sticking with my goal of reading all book club books this year on my Nook… 2 for 2 😀
No progress made on the Dystopia challenge but I am craving the genre…. luckily Pandemonium sits on my kitchen table right now… hopefully being picked up this week.
No progress here either… and looking at this list again, I need to get a move on it as there are some great reads on here that have been on my shelf too long!
For the year I am at 4,587 pages and audio equals 5 days and 38 minutes which sounds scary…. like book coma scary, but remember that is mostly active audio time as in house cleaning, getting ready in the morning, cooking, and drive time.
While February this year was down from last February by 4 books.
Stick around here long and you will hear about my book club the Bookies. If you have been visiting me for any amount of time already, feel free to insert your eye roll here. 😛
This time you can blame Shirley at My Bookshelf who asked me, “Would you do a post about keeping book clubs energized and enthusiastic with some tips, please?“
You don’t have to twist my arm to get me to talk about book club! Any time you can bring books and people together… I am in. 😀
To start with let me give you my credentials. I am pretty much just like you. I am a book lover who loves to read and loves to talk books. The Bookies started in fall of 2001, of course at the time… I did not know when I placed a note by the time clock at Wal-Mart that I was starting a book club and anyone could join, that it would turn into The Bookies.
That first book I posted as a “read this and meet me here on blah blah day at blah blah time” was Dance Upon The Air by Nora Roberts.
I posted the note three weeks in advance and then I waited. No one approached me. No one asked me about the book group I was going to start. The evening of the event, I told my husband I was going to see if anyone showed up but had an idea I would just be sitting alone in a pizza shop having a diet Pepsi with my book. I would be home probably in thirty minutes chalking this one up as a fail.
Turns out…
I was not alone.
That evening Angie (my friend who runs the blog By Book Or By Crook) and Sandy joined me to discuss out book. That day was August 14th, 2001. We had a blast, we picked a second book, Mr. Perfect by Linda Howard was that book.
That second meeting was scheduled at the same place, same time, for September 11th, 2001. Yes. 9-1-1. That fateful day in history and I went to the meeting just in case someone showed up and as it turned out, all three of us came. We shared in our sorrow over the days horrifying events and we reviewed our book.
Through the early years we grew to 8 members and remained that way until about year 5. Around then we had a growth spurt that took us to 14 members and by year 8 we had 18 members. During those growth spurts was when I started worrying about how to manage such a large group keeping us all on the book topic and keeping it interesting… that’s when we got creative.
Being such a large group it was hard to find restaurants to accommodate us and if we did find one, I worried that our laughter or our discussion might be disturbing the other patrons of the restaurant. When we took turns opening out homes we decided to potluck food around the theme of the book. Not only did this stretch our creative thinking, it bonded us through the food to the books.
Another element we added was visual props surrounding the book discussion. A few of the ladies in the group would bring pictures or their laptops to show articles that had to do with the books topics. For instance in a book we read once dealt with a lot of Victorian themed items. Pictures were brought of what these items were and what they looked like. More recently we had a power point of shoes, Italian foods and scenes of Italy played during our book review (Thank you Adraina Triginiani!)
In 2006 we added the July Queen Event where we do not choose a book to read for the month of July however we meet and grill on the lake either at a members home or at a park and we all dress in formal wear and try for Queen of the Bookies. (The Queen breaks all book choice ties and chooses a place to meet if we are undecided during her rein). This idea came from a book club read called Same Sweet Girls by Cassandra King.
Yearly in December we have a Christmas party, do a gift exchange and read a Christmas related book. If a book we read turns into a movie we try to attend as a group. We even have a Bookies Bucket List – things we would like to do as a book club.
We made a Facebook page to communicate the book, the food, where we are meeting, etc…
We have few rules. We realize that life is busy and I would much rather have someone come and hang out with us even if they did not have time to read the book. As of July 2013 we added the rule that you needed to attend at least 6 meetings a year to hold your Bookie spot as currently we have a wait list of people wanting to get into our group. We also implemented that we will not (in the future) go over the count of 16 Bookies. It just gets too hard to find places big enough for us to meet, especially during the winter when we have to be inside.
Keep it fun, keep it interesting. We grew together. Start out with books, with food, with great conversation. See which way your group grows. Every book group is different but they can all be unique and fun.
Currently Bookies is at 18 members. We dont always all make every meeting, but we are really good at communicating our thoughts on the book and rating through emails, texting, and facebook. I think the fact that we connect so well helps keep us a strong group. We care about one another. We celebrate birthdays and babies. We hang together when someone if going through something rough.
Through our 11 years of existence we have had our growing pains and made it through. It is not always easy to organize – but it is always fun 😀 A group of motley crew people brought together…
by a book. 😀
I would love to hear about your book groups! Or if you have questions I did not answer, leave them in the comments and I will respond.
Good morning!!! I hope everyone had a wonderful Valentines Day! I really did. Al is still out-of-town but he sent me a lovely dozen assorted colored roses to my work yesterday…. “ahhhhhhhh”
Then last night I had dinner over at friends of ours homes which was a lot of fun. I went over early to chat with my friend Amy, I brought a bottle of wine and dessert and she made stuffed shells which were delicious! It was really a nice evening and we ate and talked and it was really kind of nice. Her husband Chad and their older daughter joined us at the table and by the time I pulled out of their driveway I was shocked to see it was going on 10 pm. I never meet to stay that long but apparently the conversation was just what I needed. (Thanks friends!)
In staying with Reagans week of Book Blogger Reader Appreciation this week. her question on the table was what significant moment have we had in out blogging life… I think like a defining moment. For me that has to be BEA.
The Book Expo was a new thing to me. Apparently Brainerd Minnesota is placed directly under a large rock and I had never heard of such a thing. An event for book lover…. publishers, authors, and book bloggers all meet in one amazing week in New York. KNow what else was new to me?
New York.
I don’t have a lot of time to give you the story I would like to this morning as I am currently typing on borrowed time but I have to say that BEA was a defining moment in this bloggers life. People you commented with on-line…. were there in the flesh. AND most impressive to me, they were exactly like they were on-line. REAL PEOPLE. I chalk that up to being readers…. we are real.. 3 dimensional. There was not one person that I thought “wow, they are so different from I thought they would be”.
Meeting people whose blogs you enjoy is wonderful. It strengthened the community for me. It gave me new people to read and follow. We had meals together, we went to book parties together… a dream really… a dream come true.
I wish I could say more and I wish I could add some pictures of the experience but I prepped none of this last night. I came home, I went to bed. 😀
Do you have a defining moment on your blogging life? Share it here… and be sure to check out Reagans week of events and posts she has going on over at Miss Remmers Reviews.
Have you met my dear friend Reagan of Miss Remmers Reviews? She is a teacher, a hockey coach, a book blogger, and a fun to hang with gal. She was also my roommate at BEA the last two years ans to prove it… here we are:
Good times... good times....
Anyhoo…. Reagan is hosting a Book BloggerReader Appreciation Week and I love the idea! She is planning a whole week of appreciation posts and I want to participate where I can. Today, (actually yesterday) we were asked to share out book blogger history and how we feel about comments.
I started blogging in early 2009, but did not let my blog go public until June 2009. At the time, I did not even know what book blogging was, I was just writing reviews for my own records and pretty much using wordpress as an online book journal.
My first comment came on June 9, 2009…. the day I refer to as my blogiversary date as that is when book blogging came alive for me. I even remember where that first comment came from, it was Bookin’ With Bingo and it scared me. 😯 I had received an email notification that someone had commented on one of my review posts. Wha? 😯 I checked it out and there was this stranger telling me they liked my thoughts on the book. Wha? 😯 I cautiously clicked their link afraid I was going to be whooshed to some dirty site that would eat my computers brain….. but no… what did I find…..
(cue the music)
Yup… a whole new world. I was shocked. There was someone out there like me! Someone else that talked books! Two of us! Together we could conquer the book world!!! (I truly had no idea ….)
And so it began… from that book site, I found others, and found publishers and authors, and people willing to send you a book to review (WHAT????)
Now fast forward to current time… 2 3/4 years in. Yes, the books are awesome – but I buy my own books all the time as well as use my library to read books I wish too, but really… the heart of book blogging for me – is sharing my thoughts with you and hearing your thoughts on what I say. Yes, I am talking comments. I LOVE to sit down with a cup of coffee and my laptop and carry on conversations with you through my posts. And by doing this, I get to know my frequent commenters, and I love that!
I like knowing that Kathy and her hubby like to go visit their son Vance, and that in the 1990’s they lived in France (and no, that wasn’t suppose to rhyme….. 😉 )
Esme constantly makes me jealous with her worldy travels and fantastic food experiences. She still teases me that I used to visit her blog in 2009 and tell her that I could not stop at her blog any more because I always left hungry! Who knew in 2010 I would be sharing a room with her in New York for BEA?
Laurel would be a book blogger I would introduce myself to on a book site (how sad I can not recall the name) in June 2009 and then all this time later she is still one of my top commenters!
Care not only would become another roommate at BEA 2010 (we really had the rotating roommates that year LOL) but she would go on to remember my birthday every year AND send me a birthday card in the mail!
Alison has very similar book tastes to mine and when I read a review on her site, I know I will probably like the book as well. We have run into each other the last two years at BEA and went to the same author events. I look forward to seeing her again this year and hanging out!
Kim would turn me to non fiction books more than I ever was and I would never look back. She also was not only a BEA roommate of 2010, but got together with me and a handful of other bloggers for a Twin Cities book event in the fall of 2010.
Ryan is this amazing single dad who loves his son, and loves to talk books, favorite characters, and movies.
Lori and I email back and forth about books and occasionally life.
Reagan of course would not only be my roommate twice for BEA but also my roommate at the Twin Cities Book event and calls me to talk books and blogging and life!
(and of course there are so many more I could go on and on….)
My point of saying this is that to me, there is a person behind the comment and I love that! I love being able to welcome someone back from a vacation, or telling them to get well soon because I know they are sick. And I know each of these people because they commented and I did back and by reading each others posts, you learn a little something. 😀
Someone once said that comments are the bread and butter of a book blogger and I would tend to agree with that. I love to unwind from my day with all of you.
My goal is 2012 is to get back into a rhythm of commenting. I used to be a great commenter, and commented on every comment and visited their blog if they had one as well and commented their. Well of course life happens, but I do still get around as I can and try to stop in and say hi (bug me if I havent done that lately…. 😀 )
To wrap up this LONG post I want to do a giveaway today in honor of Reagan’s BBRAW. Leave a comment (yup that’s it!) here today sharing with me your thoughts on comments and I will enter you into a drawing for a $10 gift card to Amazon. Winner drawn using random.org on Friday the 17th.
Oh! And its not too late to sign up for BBRAW! Go here!
I have seen a couple posts as of late on re-reading. It really got me thinking about this as book lovers, who usually have more books in-house and on our wish list then we could ever hope to read… what makes people like us drop everything to read a book again? Certainly you can not have that same “first time” experience again…. yet I am betting each and every one of us has at least one go to book that they hang on to and know they could read it again and again and love it every time.
So why?
For me, I get something a little more out of a book each time I read it. I may pick up something I missed before, or now knowing how it all turns out, words can take on new meaning, and I can appreciate the author even more for a turn of a phrase, or a clue to something coming that at the time… I did not realize was a clue of things to come.
I refer to books like these as comfort reads. Books I can turn to at any time, I know they are there… I know they will satisfy. I already know I love these books. Characters can become deeper, more three dimensional the second third and fourth time around. I now… know them. Not only do I know what they will do and why they will do it… I go through it all with them.
What makes me turn to these books, when again, I am surrounded by lovely books yet to be read…
It could be a mood… maybe I am going through something hard in my life and I don’t want to crack the code on a new book… I want to go where the characters are known, where I can enjoy a butter beer (oops… have I said too much? 😉 ) Perhaps I am tired, or in need of an old friend… but time and again I will visit these books.
My list … currently is short. While I have many books that I keep and feel I may one day re-read… there are few that I actually have.
The Harry Potter series. All of them.
Seriously… every time I talk about them I want to read them (like now!). I can easily go back to Hogwarts any time and see these fantastic characters. Every year I read at least one of these books. When book 7 came out I read through it quickly in three days to avoid hearing any spoilers… and then turned around and read it again that same week… more slowly, savoring and enjoying every page.
Summerhouse is truly a magical read of what if you could go back and make a different choice… I ADORE this book. Every time I see it somewhere at a sale I buy it to give to friends. I personally own two paperbacks of it and two hardcovers, one in large print. Fantastic book I have read probably 5 times so far…
Dance Upon The Air was our first ever book club pick in August of 2001. At that time, and to still to this day, I am not a Nora Roberts fan. Never much of a romance reader…. HOWEVER – this is not Nora’s typical fare…. this series is about three women with powers…. one who doesn’t know she has them (Nell, Dance Upon The Air), one who knows she has them but wished she did not (Ripley, Heaven and Earth) and one who has them, loves the ability to do good…. and embraces them, (Mia, Face The Fire). For the record…. Mia is also my favorite all time female character. She is tough, independent, beautiful, and the owner of a book store. Seriously, what is not to love? 😛 About every couple of years I read this series again… and…. I am about due….
No classics on this list…. yet. While I have classics I adore (To Kill A Mockingbird), I still love basking in the memory of the story and as of yet, do not wish to dive in again.
Do you have books that you read time and again? Why? What do you get out of them that second and third time around?
Welcome to It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? This is a great way to plan out your reading week and see what others are currently reading as well… you never know where that next “must read” book will come from!
I love being a part of this and I hope you do too! As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. I offer a weekly contest for those who visit 10 or more of the Monday Meme participants and leave a comment telling me how many you visited. **You do not have to have a blog to participate! You receive one entry for every 10 comments, just come back here and tell me how many in the comment area.
It was a pretty good week. I did not get to Cinder yet but will be starting it tonight. I have so looked forward to reading time lately… and here is what I have coming up this week:
One enchanting romance. Two lovers keeping secrets. And a uniquely crafted book that binds their stories forever.
When Evelyn Morgan walked into the village bookstore, she didn’t know she would meet the love of her life. When Brendan Thorne handed her a medieval romance, he didn’t know it would change the course of his future. It was almost as if they were the cursed lovers in the old book itself . . .
The Thorn and the Blossom is a remarkable literary artifact: You can open the book in either direction to decide whether you’ll first read Brendan’s, or Evelyn’s account of the mysterious love affair. Choose a side, read it like a regular novel—and when you get to the end, you’ll find yourself at a whole new beginning.
How exciting does this book sound? I hope to be into it by mid week!
A dysfunctional New England family struggles toward normalcy in this poignant novel from PEN/Hemingway-winner Haigh, who follows the children of resentful, controlling, Paulette and distracted, needy Frank. Even during a childhood in idyllic Cape Cod, there are hints of a rocky future. When that future arrives, Billy, the most successful of the children, keeps a secret about his sophisticated New York life from almost everyone. Scott, formerly the uncontrollable brat of the bunch, sees himself in his own troubled son. Meanwhile, Gwen suffers from a genetic condition that prevents her from developing into womanhood.
This one is for a tour… I have heard good things about author Jennifer Haigh.
Austin Parker is on a journey to bring truth, beauty, and meaning to his life. Austin Parker is never going to see his eighteenth birthday. At the rate he’s going, he probably won’t even see the end of the year. The doctors say his chances of surviving are slim to none even with treatment, so he’s decided it’s time to let go. But before he goes, Austin wants to mend the broken fences in his life. So with the help of his best friend, Kaylee, Austin visits every person in his life who touched him in a special way. He journeys to places he’s loved and those he’s never seen. And what starts as a way to say goodbye turns into a personal journey that brings love, acceptance, and meaning to Austin’s life.
This is one from the Debut Authors of 2012 and I am so excited to read this one!
At Fairfield High School, on the outskirts of Chicago, everyone knows that south siders and north siders aren’t exactly compatible elements. So when head cheerleader Brittany Ellis and gang member Alex Fuentes are forced to be lab partners in chemistry class, the results are bound to be explosive. Neither teen is prepared for the most surprising chemical reaction of all — love. Can they break through the stereotypes and misconceptions that threaten to keep them apart? Travel to both sides of the tracks in a passionate love story about looking beneath the surface.
I have wanted to read this ever since I met Simone Elkeles in New York in 2010!
After years of wandering from whim to whim, thirty-year-old Charlotte Wheelwright seems to have at last found her niche. The free spirit enjoys running an organic gardening business on the island of Nantucket, thanks in large part to her spry grandmother Nona, who donated a portion of her land on the family’s seaside compound to get Charlotte started. Though Charlotte’s skill with plants is bringing her success, cultivating something deeper with people-particulary her handsome neighbor Coop-might be more of a challenge.Nona’s generosity to Charlotte, secretly her favorite grandchild, doesn’t sit well with the rest of the Wheelwright clan, however, as they worry that Charlotte may be positioning herself to inherit the entire estate. With summer upon them, everyone is making their annual pilgrimage to the homestead-some with hopes of thwarting Charlotte’s dreams, others in anticipation of Nona’s latest pronouncements at the annual family meeting, and still others with surprising news of their own. Charlotte’s mother, Helen, a Wheelwright by marriage, brings a heavy heart. She once set aside her own ambitions to fit in with the Wheelwrights, but now she must confront a betrayal that threatens both her sense of place and her sense of self.As summer progresses, these three women-Charlotte, Nona, and Helen-come to terms with the decisons they have made. Revisiting the lives and loves that have crossed their paths and the possibilities of the the roads not taken, they may just discover that what they’ve always sought out was right in front of them all along.
One of my favorite all time reads is called Summer House (Jude Deveroux) and since then the title always sparks up visions of friends and get aways, giggles, and magical moments. I read any book I find with this title.
There’s my week – it probably looks HUGE. It does look huge doesn’t it? But really – The Thorn and The Blossom looks small and so does Never Eighteen. The audio books are replacing two I have ending so may not finish them this week, but I am starting them…. and probably a third too… 😀
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