2013 BOOK CHALLENGE! Are you in?

[Simba's Mom]

I love Joanne Fluke's books. I have never tried her recipes. Maybe when it gets cooler.

I'm also a Joanne Fluke fan.
Right now I'm reading "Porch Lights" by Dorothea Benton Frank. I THINK that author was recommended to me here. I'd read one of her books several years ago and wasn't crazy about it, but I decided to give her a second chance. So glad I did! This is a great "beach read" kind of book, especially for anyone who likes the low country area (Hilton Head fans, for instance). I updated my goal to 75 on Goodreads, and even at that I'm ahead-#51!

 

[willowsnn3]

Goal 72

#50 Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

Review from Goodreads:
“Black smoke stains a summer blue sky. A school is on fire. And one mother, Grace, sees the smoke and rushes. She knows her teenage daughter Jenny is inside. She runs into the burning building to rescue her.
“Afterwards Grace must find the identity of the arsonist and protect her children from the person who’s still intent on destroying them. Afterwards, she must fight the limits of her physical strength and discover the limitlessness of love.”
Was just ok for me. 2 out of 5 stars.

 

[Glynis]

I love Joanne Fluke's books. I have never tried her recipes. Maybe when it gets cooler.

I love her books!!! I've tried a bunch of her recipes, and they are all really good! Her cookie recipes are amazing, and there's a blueberry muffin recipe that is so good, people request that I make and bring them to gatherings! You won't be sorry if you try them!

 

[Glynis]

Goal - 100 books

Book #47 - "Beautiful Creatures" by Kim Garcia and Margaret Stohl

A supernatural love story, is the way I would categorize this book. Beautifully written, with characters you root for, and a plot line that is engaging! This is what I wanted the "Twilight" series to be! I would recommend this book a lot!

Can you tell I liked it?

Next up: Beyonders: Chasing the Prophecy by Brandon Mull

 

[Cogswel_Cogs]

Anyone who might be interested I would love to send out a couple of kindle or nook gift copies of my latest work.

"Written for You" is a dark comedy with a mysterious twist to it.

Just put it out today for the Kindle and will be loading to Nook tonight.

Anyone interested just send me email.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18086777-written-for-you

 

[DisneyWalle]

This has been a good week for reading -- raining everyday, DS was sick and no Internet.

#18 - The Bride Collector by Ted Dekker (very good)

FBI Special agent Brad Raines is facing his toughest case yet. A Denver serial killer has killed four beautiful young women, leaving a bridal veil at each crime scene, and he's picking up his pace. Unable to crack the case, Raines appeals for help from a most unusual source: residents of the Center for Wellness and Intelligence, a private psychiatric institution for mentally ill individuals whose are extraordinarily gifted.

It's there that he meets Paradise, a young woman who witnessed her father murder her family and barely escaped his hand. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Paradise may also have an extrasensory gift: the ability to experience the final moments of a person's life when she touches the dead body.

In a desperate attempt to find the killer, Raines enlists Paradise's help. In an effort to win her trust, he befriends this strange young woman and begins to see in her qualities that most 'sane people' sorely lack. Gradually, he starts to question whether sanity resides outside the hospital walls...or inside.

As the Bride Collector picks up the pace-and volume-of his gruesome crucifixions, the case becomes even more personal to Raines when his friend and colleague, a beautiful young forensic psychologist, becomes the Bride Collector's next target.

The FBI believes that the killer plans to murder seven women. Can Paradise help before it's too late?

#19 - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling (Good)

The war against Voldemort is not going well; even the Muggles have been affected. Dumbledore is absent from Hogwarts for long stretches of time, and the Order of the Phoenix has already suffered losses.

And yet . . . as with all wars, life goes on. Sixth-year students learn to Apparate. Teenagers flirt and fight and fall in love. Harry receives some extraordinary help in Potions from the mysterious Half-Blood Prince. And with Dumbledore's guidance, he seeks out the full, complex story of the boy who became Lord Voldemort -- and thus finds what may be his only vulnerability.


#20 - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (very good)

The heart of Book 7 is a hero's mission--not just in Harry's quest for the Horcruxes, but in his journey from boy to man--and Harry faces more danger than that found in all six books combined, from the direct threat of the Death Eaters and you-know-who, to the subtle perils of losing faith in himself.

Next book: House by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker

 

[tinkerbellfan6880]

I love Joanne Fluke's books. I have never tried her recipes. Maybe when it gets cooler.

When I read one of books I read them out of order. The book I had read I want and wrote all the recipes down to try out. But I am a little afraid to try them because I made pumpkin spice cupcakes back in November that I had gotten off of a blog. That turned out to be a disaster because the cupcakes were so moist and wet that no one in my family ate them.

Finished the Joanne Fluke book this morning at 2am. So I am have now read 49 out of 80 books. Still reading Smokin' Seventeen. Added Tapestry of Fortunes by Elizabeth Berg.

 

[zippitydoo]

Book 25 of 30

Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich

 

[tinkerbellfan6880]

Book 25 of 30

Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich

Read that awhile ago and I loved reading it. Janet Evanovich's books are so good to read.

 

[nemofans]

Goal - 100 books

Book #47 - "Beautiful Creatures" by Kim Garcia and Margaret Stohl

A supernatural love story, is the way I would categorize this book. Beautifully written, with characters you root for, and a plot line that is engaging! This is what I wanted the "Twilight" series to be! I would recommend this book a lot!

Can you tell I liked it?

Next up: Beyonders: Chasing the Prophecy by Brandon Mull

I added this book to my list. I was not much of a fan of the Twilight books (or movies) & felt they could have been so much better. So your description for this book as what Twilight should have been, has me intrigued.

 

[WowLookAtThat]

Book # 56 Anne of Windy Poplars by LM Montgomery

Book #57 A Woman's View by Jeanine Basinger

 

[DisneyWalle]

#21 - House by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker

The stakes of the game become clear when a tin can is tossed into the house with rules scrawled on it. Rules that only a madman—or worse—could have written. Rules that make no sense yet must be followed.

One game. Seven players. Three rules. Game ends at dawn.


I didn't really like this book. The story was slow and almost repetitive with poor character development.

Next book: Obsessed by Ted Dekker

 

[CaliBear]

17. The Sisterhood by Helen Bryan

 

[PigletsPal2]

Goal: 75 books this year.

#66 down and done.

The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose by Susan Wittig Albert. This is the third in the series about the Dahlias, the ladies of the garden club of Darling, Alabama, set in the middle of the 1930's during the depression.

With money missing from the county treasury, where Dahlia member Verna Tidwell runs the office, secret codes possibly dating from "the War of Northern Aggression" and the bizarre behavior of a local resident, Darling, Alabama on the eve of Confederate Day is anything but a sleepy little town.

This is a cute series, and I look forward to more.

Queen Colleen

 

[DisneyWalle]

#22 - Obsessed by Ted Dekker

Oh my! One of the best books I have read in a long time. Highly recommended especially if you like Ted Dekker. Great book!

Stephen Friedman is making a good living in good times. He's just an ordinary guy. Or so he thinks.
But one day an extraordinary piece of information tells him differently. It's a clue from the grave of a Holocaust survivor. A clue that makes him heir to an incredible fortune . . . a clue that only he and one other man can possibly understand.
That man is Roth Braun, a serial killer who has been waiting for Stephen for thirty years. Roth was stopped once before. This time nothing will get in his way.

#23 - Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

The basis for the story was good but I struggled with the book. It isn't a long story but James manages to draw it out and the characters I really wanted to read about didn't play main roles.

In their six years of marriage, Elizabeth and Darcy have forged a peaceful, happy life for their family at Pemberley, Darcys impressive estate. Her father is a regular visitor; her sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; the marriage prospects for Darcys sister, Georgiana, are favorable. And preparations for their annual autumn ball are proceeding apace. But on the eve of the ball, chaos descends. Lydia Wickham, Elizabeths disgraced sister who, with her husband, has been barred from the estate, arrives in a hysterical stateshrieking that Wickham has been murdered. Plunged into frightening mystery and a lurid murder trial, the lives of Pemberleys owners and servants alike may never be the same.

 

[RunningGirl]

#36 done - The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan.

In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Ashkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next thirty-five years in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Based on extensive research, and springing from his enormously resonant documentary that aired on NPR's Fresh Air in 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation.​

This was a good book based on a true story, although it got dry in a couple of places. Definitely a book to make you think.

 

[GaBelle]

#22 - Obsessed by Ted Dekker

Oh my! One of the best books I have read in a long time. Highly recommended especially if you like Ted Dekker. Great book!

Stephen Friedman is making a good living in good times. He's just an ordinary guy. Or so he thinks.
But one day an extraordinary piece of information tells him differently. It's a clue from the grave of a Holocaust survivor. A clue that makes him heir to an incredible fortune . . . a clue that only he and one other man can possibly understand.
That man is Roth Braun, a serial killer who has been waiting for Stephen for thirty years. Roth was stopped once before. This time nothing will get in his way.

#23 - Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

The basis for the story was good but I struggled with the book. It isn't a long story but James manages to draw it out and the characters I really wanted to read about didn't play main roles.

In their six years of marriage, Elizabeth and Darcy have forged a peaceful, happy life for their family at Pemberley, Darcys impressive estate. Her father is a regular visitor; her sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; the marriage prospects for Darcys sister, Georgiana, are favorable. And preparations for their annual autumn ball are proceeding apace. But on the eve of the ball, chaos descends. Lydia Wickham, Elizabeths disgraced sister who, with her husband, has been barred from the estate, arrives in a hysterical stateshrieking that Wickham has been murdered. Plunged into frightening mystery and a lurid murder trial, the lives of Pemberleys owners and servants alike may never be the same.

I've been on the fence about Death comes to Pemberley as I am a huge Jane Austen fan.
Does the author do her justice?

 

[StephMK]

I LOVE Sophie Kinsella books. Think "I Love Lucy-The Book". Another good one, cheaper on Kindle is "My Big Fake Irish Life" by Caitlin McKenna. I thought that was similar in style. I just got another of McKenna's books, but I haven't read it yet, so I can't recommend it. But I really hope it's another in the Sophie Kinsella style.

#38 - My Big Fake Irish Life - cute and I agree, similar in style. Nice, easy summer read. It would make a cute movie!

 

[PigletsPal2]

I've been on the fence about Death comes to Pemberley as I am a huge Jane Austen fan.
Does the author do her justice?

I think so, but I'm also a huge P. D. James fan, and I love a mystery.

For a different, but interesting, take on Jane Austen, I recommend a book by Robert Rodi, Bi**h in a Bonnet. He's a fan, but he challenges the notion the Austen is the goddess of chick-lit and "exposes" her as the premier satirist of her century. He had me laughing out loud on every other page. I wrote a review on page 132, post 1973 of this thread.

Queen Colleen

 

[DisneyWalle]

I've been on the fence about Death comes to Pemberley as I am a huge Jane Austen fan.
Does the author do her justice?

Not in my opinion. But if you would like the book, I will be happy to mail it too you media mail -- no charge. Just let me know. I have no interest in keeping it. (It's a hardback with the jacket cover)