It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?

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.

 

Last weeks winner: West Virginia Red Reads

Congratulations!  Please choose a book or bookish item from the Reading Cafe!

**Please note I am way behind on sending out books so if you are waiting on a book from me I do apologize.  I am planning on packaging and taking a trip to the post office this Tuesday so be sure if you are waiting on a book from me that you have sent your mailing address (not PO box numbers) to my email at joureythroughbooks@gmail.com

I have still not surpassed that reading slump.  I don’t even think “slump” is the right word because its not that I don’t want to read, its that time has not allowed for reading and by the time I get home from whatever I am too tired.  That should change a bit this week as I leave for Florida on Thursday morning and will have plane reading time and a little down time too while there with College Son visiting Navy Son through the weekend. 

Last week here are the posts I put up:

Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner

Building a Pole Barn to survive a Zombie Apocalypse

I Michael Bennett by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

 

 

SO here is what is on the reading plan for this week:

The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen and emancipated from the system with nowhere to go, Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with a mysterious stranger has her questioning what’s been missing in her life. And when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.

This is out book club pick for November.

Nashville music star and family man, Cole Michaels, is persuaded to embrace an ‘American Dream’ theology that promises comfort, happiness, and success. But when the unimaginable happens, Cole blames God and abandons his faith. More vulnerable than ever, he is clueless that an evil character with an unspeakable secret is using every available resource to find him.

Can two old sages, a beautiful blonde, a violin called the Mysterious Lady, and a Triumph motorcycle help prepare Cole for his ultimate trial?

Many years ago I fell in love with Randall’s writing – I devoured the three books he had out and waited and waited for more but nothing came…. here is where blogging gets cool – when he wrote this book – he found me, emailed me and asked me to review it. 

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.  

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Just a book I have really been interested in.

 

 

 

 

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard.

Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.

When she was six years old, Yang’s family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice.

I met Kao this past week at a literacy conference and she blew me away… I could not wait to read her book!

 

 

 

That’s the plan – what is yours?  I would love to see what you are reading and what you read this past week as well.  Please link up your What Are You Reading post below where it says click here.  I am going to try to get around to your posts as I can this week. 

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and those of you who read mainly children’s through YA reads – please ALSO link your post here:

I, Michael Bennett by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Life has never really been easy for Detective Michael Bennett.  After he and his wife adopted ten , children (not a typo), she took ill and eventually died of cancer.  For years non Michael has been making it work with the help of Grandpa Seamus and the live in nanny Mary Catherine.  He juggles life between the kids and his job and for the most part it works.

Then Michael finds himself with the opportunity to be part of taking down a big time crime lord and after the set up is launched and the gun smoke has cleared, a good friend and fellow officer is left dead and the crime lord has escaped.  Michael feels as though he is about to crack in two, and instead grabs the whole family, Seamus and Mary Catherine too and  heads to the sanctuary of their family cabin in Newburgh New York. 

At first this time away is bliss, kids splashing in the lake, burgers and steaks on the grill.  really just what the doctor ordered – but as Michael has learned all to well time and again… things are not always as they seem.  When two of his kids get caught up with some local gang members things go bad very quickly… what starts out as looking random is soon discovered it is not.  It looks that Michael and hid family are being targeted.

Whats a guy got to do for a little “r and r”?

 

I just seen this new cover…. is that what Michael looks like? Is it? Is it????

 

I have enjoyed the Patterson/Ledwidge author combo in this series since I first listened to the first book in this series, Step On A Crack, which explains the Bennett family dynamics.  This series is not as gruesome as some of Patterson’s books can be, the family dynamics really give it a nice level feel without being overly gushy the other direction…. Michael is still a detective in New York and the crimes are sometimes harsh.

As this series goes on I am really enjoying it.  The story line has not become old for me, I enjoy the family and the underlying possible relationship (someday…. maybe…) between Mary Catherine and Michael.  The kids, ages 3 to 13, offer a fun addition to the books to as kids will be kids… the little ones adorable… the older boys getting into mischief as you will see in this book. 

I have seen on-line a bit of grumbling about how this one ends and some others saying they didn’t know they would have to read another book. To that I say…. hello….. you are in the middle of a series and no one has said “Michael Bennett – The End yet.   If I were to guess, I am going to say that due to the way this one ended I think the series is going to wrap up soon with this one big case. 

If you like a good detective story with really good characters and writing, give these books a try.  I have thoroughly enjoyed them all on audio.  Something about Patterson’s narrated books that are pretty AWESOME! 

Sunday Check List, MONSTER Dash, and A WHOLE LOT OF Fun Books!

Good Morning.    For a while now I have been wanting to put my own twist on a Sunday post.  I like the Sunday Salon, but wanted to implement another cool thing I have seen occasionally around the blogs and that is when people kind of check list what they have going on in different areas of their life.  Today I am going to give it a test run and see how it goes.

Today….

 

I am reading The Late Homecomer by Kao Kalia Yang

 

I am listening to I, Steve Jobs (IPOD), Late Late at Night by Rick Springfield (kitchen CD player), Child 44 (car)

 

I am hoping today…. I can finish a book, write a couple of reviews, visit some blogs

 

I am working on… getting ready to go to Florida later this week

 

I am looking forward to… Florida and hanging out with both of my boys!

 

I need to… prep some books for mailing, laundry, return some items around town

 

I want to… watch a movie tonight with popcorn and a warm blanket

 

I am watching… a light snow fall

 

The books that entered the doors this week are:

 

All are review books except Lord Of The Flies is a win from Banned Book Week and fall to grace was a book I bought after a raving recommendation by a friend.

For those of you who know that I did the Monster Dash yesterday morning (and if you didn’t you do now! ), it was cool out but wasn’t cold until I stopped running then I got COLD fast!  My friend Amy (AKA Wonder Woman) was a trooper and waited for me when I had to make an unplanned bathroom stop at an Assisted Living Home on route as I was not sure I would make it the whole way.  GAH.   I will post more picks of this event next weekend for Saturday snapshot but for one of us in action:

Running in the Monster Dash! Me and my friend Amy who will do just about anything crazy with me!

So that’s my morning post.  Hope your Sunday is wonderful.  Are you doing anything fun?