Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult

This is one of my 3 favorite Picoult books. I think it was the topics of religion and the death penalty that caught and kept my attention.

From Amazon: Examining a condemned inmate's desire to be an organ donor. Freelance carpenter Shay Bourne was sentenced to death for killing a little girl, Elizabeth Nealon, and her cop stepfather. Eleven years after the murders, Elizabeth's sister, Claire, needs a heart transplant, and Shay volunteers, which complicates the state's execution plans. Meanwhile, death row has been the scene of some odd events since Shay's arrival—an AIDS victim goes into remission, an inmate's pet bird dies and is brought back to life, wine flows from the water faucets. The author brings other compelling elements to an already complex plot line: the priest who serves as Shay's spiritual adviser was on the jury that sentenced him; Shay's ACLU representative, Maggie Bloom, balances her professional moxie with her negative self-image and difficult relationship with her mother.

Living Dead In Dallas by CHarlaine Harris

I'm hooked!

From Amazon: For years, Charlaine Harris has delighted fans with her mystery series featuring small-town waitress-turned- paranormal sleuth Sookie Stackhouse. Now, Ace is pleased to republish her second novel in the series in hardcover. In this book, Sookie is pursued by a very sexy vampire—and a very deadly monster. With HBO and Alan Ball, creator of Six Feet Under, launching an all-new series, True Blood, based on the Southern Vampire novels, the demand for Charlaine Harris and Sookie Stackhouse is going to be bigger than ever.

The Shack by William P. Young

I'm not sure why this book didn't do it for me. There were parts I agreed with and others that just rubbed me the wrong way. Which, I might have been having some of the issues the main character was excepting the "image" of God the author was trying communicate.

That said I am glad I listened to this one.

From Amazon: Mackenzie Allen Philips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?"

2009 Reading List

Just a list of books I'd like to get too this year.

1. Living Dead In Dallas READ
2. Change of Heart READ
3. So Brave So Young
4. Tin Collectors
5. White Out
6. Lost & Found
7. Appaloosa
8. 2nd Chance
9. Vanishing Acts
10. No Mercy
11. Traveler
12. The Appeal
13. Back When We Were Grown Ups
14. Big Cherry Holler
15. Cry Last Heard
16. Cure For Modern Life
17. Well of Lost Plots
18. Eyes of Prey
19. I Am Legend
20. Two For The Dough
21. Skinny Dipp

Authors I'd like read at least one book by:

• Beth Gutcheon
• Robert B. Parker (Spencer Series)
• Nelson DeMille
• Jennifer Wiener
• John Katzenbach
• Michael Crichton

Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr

From Amazon: When Deanna's father catches her having sex in a car when she is 13, her life is drastically changed. Two years later, he still can't look her in the eye, and though Tommy is the only boy she's been with, she is branded the school slut. Her entire family watches her as though she is likely to sleep with anyone she sees, and Tommy still smirks at and torments her when she sees him. Her two best friends have recently begun dating, and Deanna feels like an intruder. She tries to maintain a close relationship with her older brother, but Darren and his girlfriend are struggling as teenage parents. Deanna learns to protect herself by becoming outwardly tough, but feels her isolation acutely. Her only outlet is her journal in which she writes the story of an anonymous girl who has the same experiences and feelings that she does.

The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler

What a fun and dark read! I found myself wondering where the story was taking from the beginning all the way to the end and still find myself wondering about what really happened. So glad I picked this one up.

From Amazon: Flannery Culp is 19, precocious, pretentious and incarcerated. Accused of Satanism and convicted of murder, she and her seven friends (the "Basic Eight") have been reviled and misunderstood on the Winnie Moprah Show and similar tabloid venues. So Flannery has typed up and annotated the journals of her high school years in order to tell her real story: "Perhaps they'll look at my name under the introduction with disdain, expecting apologies or pleas for pity. I have none here." Handler's sharply observed, mischievous first novel consists of Flannery's diaries from the beginning of her senior year to the Halloween murder of Adam State and its aftermath. The journals detail Flan's life in her clique of upper-middle-class San Francisco school friends, who desperately emulate adulthood by throwing dinner parties and carrying liquor flasks. Kate ("the Queen Bee"), Natasha ("less like a high school student and more like an actress playing a high school student on TV"), Gabriel ("the kindest boy in the world" and in love with Flan) and the rest begin experimenting with the hallucinogen absinthe. Squabbles once easily resolved grow deeper and darker when Natasha poisons the biology teacher who has been tormenting Flan. Should the Basic Eight turn on, and turn in, one of their own? Handler deftly keeps the mood light even as the plot careens forward, and as FlanAnever a reliable narratorAbecomes increasingly unhinged. The links between teen social life, tabloid culture and serious violence have been explored and exploited before, but Handler, and Flannery, know that. If they're not the first to use such material, they may well be the coolest. Handler's confident satire is not only cheeky but packed with downright lovable characters whose youthful misadventures keep the novel neatly balanced between absurdity and poignancy.

Chasing Windmills by Catherine Ryan Hyde

I listened to this book and enjoyed it even though it was a bit perdictable.

From Amazon: In the simple and captivating latest from Pay It Forward author Hyde, a chance encounter proves life-changing for two lonely New York City subway riders. Four months shy of 18, Sebastian Mundt has been held a virtual prisoner by his father since his mother died: his father home-schools him and doesn't let him have outside relationships. One night, with his father heavily sedated by his sleeping pill, Sebastian sneaks out to ride the subway and locks eyes with Maria Arquette, a young mother who is caught in an abusive marriage. The two share an instant connection and take to meeting on the subway almost nightly and tentatively planning a future in the California desert town that Sebastian remembers from childhood, where thousands of windmills stretch out across the horizon.

Promise Not To Tell by Jennifer Mcmahon****

I love when I find a new author that I can't wait to read their next book! Jennifer Mcmahon is one of those authors.

From Amazon: Part mystery-thriller and part ghost story, McMahon's well-paced debut alternates smoothly between past and present. In the fall of 2002, 41-year-old Kate Cypher, a divorced Seattle school nurse, returns to New Hope, the decaying Vermont hippie commune where she grew up, to visit her elderly mother, Jean, who's suffering from Alzheimer's. Kate has avoided New Hope since the grizzly, unsolved murder of her fifth-grade friend, Del Griswold, 31 years earlier. Kate fears she betrayed Del, a free-spirited farm girl. Did her betrayal cause Del's death? Who killed Del? Another local girl is murdered in a similar manner at the time of Kate's return. Could the killer be loose again? Meanwhile, Jean appears to be possessed with Del's spirit and may have the answers to these questions. As Kate investigates, she learns stunning truths about many events and people from her youth. McMahon does a particularly good job of portraying the cruelty of school children.

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris ***

I listened to Dean Until Dark while watching the series based on the book True Blood. Think this made it more fun to listen to that it might have been other wise. I'm not sure if I'll continue with the series or not. Maybe I'll wait till the second season of True Blood starts.

Amazon Editorial Review:
Sookie Stackhouse is just a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. Until the vampire of her dreams walks into her life-and one of her coworkers checks out....

Maybe having a vampire for a boyfriend isn't such a bright idea.

A fun, fast, funny, and wonderfully intriguing blend of vampire and mystery that's hard to put down, and should not be missed. (Susan Sizemore)

Touching Snow by M. Sindy Felin ******

Touching Snow was a shared read with my daughter. We both loved it. Thought it was a sad and dark story but still uplifiting.

From Amazon: Grade 8 Up—To those back in Haiti, "touching snow" means living in America. For seventh-grader Karina, however, life in suburban Chestnut Valley, NY, is far from easy. Her extended family struggles to survive in a world in which they are social and cultural outsiders, where food and shelter are still uncertain, and where a visit from the authorities can mean deportation to a much more desperate homeland. For Karina, though, the biggest threat is within her family. Her stepfather uses brutal force to dominate his wife and stepdaughters. While Karina nurtures dreams of education and connects with caring people who might help her, she is held back by a man who sees his shaky power diminished by any sign of the girls' independence. As Karina and her sisters mature, this conflict escalates to a terrible scale. The author writes with insight about the realities of immigrant life, Haitian American culture, and the double worlds inhabited by many first-generation Americans like Karina. Readers can see the compromises that family members make in the name of survival and the stresses that drive the stepfather's rage, while still holding to the truth that these girls and their mother deserve a life without violence. Although the resolution is brutal, this story is a compelling read from an important and much-needed new voice. Readers will cheer for the young narrator who is determined to step out of the role of victim and build a safe and meaningful life for herself and her family.—Carolyn Lehman, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA

No One You Know by Michelle Richmond ****

I don't know exactly what it is that appeals to me about Michelle Richmond's writing but she has become one of my favorite authors. The voice she gives her characters rings very true to me.

I enjoyed No One You Know even more than Year of Fog.

From Amazon:
Twenty years later, Ellie Enderlin is still haunted by the unsolved murder of her older sister, Lila, a brilliant math Ph.D. candidate at Stanford. With her family in turmoil after Lila's death, Ellie confides in a sympathetic English professor who then uses her confidences to write a hugely popular true crime book. Now a professional coffee taster and buyer, Ellie is on a business trip in Nicaragua when she by chance encounters Peter, Lila's secret lover and the man who the book claimed was Lila's killer, although the conjecture was never confirmed. This intense meeting reopens the painful past and sends Ellie on a renewed quest to find her sister's killer. This thoughtful, gripping page-turner grabs the reader's attention from the first chapter. Recommended for all public libraries. ~Andrea Griffith -- Library Journal

Long Time No Post

It's been a little over a year since I posted! Coincidentally I started a new job a little over a year ago that is much more demanding and I have had little time to post. Less time to read. However, still squeezing in as much reading time as I can.

Currently I'm reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Suggested not only by my daughter Layla's but by a couple of friends. Thought I better get with it before the movie comes out.

I've recently started to listen to audio books. Which I've wanted to for a long time. I'm hoping it will motivate me to exercise more. Ha! It's great to listen to at work while I do time cards. Currently I'm listening to Dead Till Dark and the one before that was The Curse of The Spellmans by Lisa Lutz.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen #51

From Amazon: Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn't write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

The Office of Desire by Martha Moody #50

From Amazon: sharply observed tale of office relationships gone very wrong at a small Ohio medical practice. When Dr. Will Strub marries office nurse Alicia, he becomes increasingly involved in the local fundamentalist church. That puts him somewhat at odds with his fellow doctor and business partner, Dr. Hap Markowitz, who defines himself as a non-observant, God-fearing Jew. Meanwhile, middle aged office receptionist Caroline begins her own new relationship with a 72-year-old patient named Fred, while Hap devotes his spare time to his seriously ill wife, making office manager Brice literally the odd man out. The slow descent into insanity by one of the characters leads to a tragedy that affects all involved; gay relationships, evangelical fervor, amputation and infidelity all play in. There is a point where loyalty became a sickness, where faithfulness to someone else became a way to destroy yourself, Hap observes, and each of Moody's well-drawn characters embodies that statement in his or her own way.

Sliver of Truth by Lisa Unger #49

From Amazon: From the cryptic opening section, which ends with a New York Times reporter finding her husband bleeding to death, Unger grabs the reader by the throat and doesn't let go. Meanwhile, the FBI informs Ridley Jones, a magazine writer, that her late uncle, Max Smiley (who's really her biological father), is still alive and being sought by assorted international players on all sides of the law. Rapidly finding that little in her life is what it seems, Jones is horrified to be confronted with evidence indicating that Smiley is a misogynistic monster of the first order, who may have played a role in the murder of the reporter's husband.

Doohickey by Pete Hautman #48 ***

From Amazon: Nicholas Fashon and his pal Vince Love own a fashionable leather goods store in Tucson, Ariz. Nick's roguish granddad dies, leaving him a inheritance of useless inventions. Useless, that is, with one exception: a doohickey called the HandyMate, which performs numerous kitchen functions most efficiently. Yola Fuentes, a TV chef, is interested in the HandyMate and wants to use it on her TV show. Nick is grateful, especially since the building housing his store and the apartment upstairs containing all his worldly goods has just burned down. The fire department says the cause was electrical, but the insurance company says it's arson and won't pay. In addition, his partner Vince owes money to a scary man called Robo who, after cracking several of Vince's ribs, threatens to kill him for an encore. Nick isn't sure whom to trust.

These Is My Words by Nancy E. Turner #47 ****

From Amazon: Based on the real-life exploits of the author's great-grandmother, this fictionalized diary vividly details one woman's struggles with life and love in frontier Arizona at the end of the last century. When she begins recording her life, Sarah Prine is an intelligent, headstrong 18-year-old capable of holding her own on her family's settlement near Tucson. Her skill with a rifle fends off a constant barrage of Indian attacks and outlaw assaults. It also attracts a handsome Army captain named Jack Elliot. By the time she's 21, Sarah has recorded her loveless marriage to a family friend, the establishment of a profitable ranch, the birth of her first child?and the death of her husband. The love between Jack and Sarah, which dominates the rest of the tale, has begun to blossom. Fragmented and disjointed in its early chapters, with poor spelling and grammar, Sarah's journal gradually gains in clarity and eloquence as she matures. While this device may frustrate some readers at first, Taylor's deft progression produces the intended reward: she not only tells of her heroine's growth, but she shows it through Sarah's writing and insights. The result is a compelling portrait of an enduring love, the rough old West and a memorable pioneer.

Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay #46 ***

From Amazon: In Lindsay's third novel to feature endearing Miami cop and serial killer Dexter Morgan (after 2005's Darkly Devoted Dexter), the Dark Passenger, the voice inside Dexter's head that from time to time drives him to the Theme Park of the Unthinkable, inexplicably disappears while Morgan is investigating a gruesome double murder on the University of Miami campus. The crime scene, at which two co-eds were ritualistically burned and beheaded, gives even the human vivisection–loving vigilante the creeps. As the burned and beheaded body count continues to mount, Morgan realizes that the force behind the killings is something even more evil than his Dark Passenger. Though the macabre wit that powered the first two installments of this delightfully dark series (also a hit on TV's Showtime) is still evident, this third entry takes a decidedly deep introspective turn as Dexter is forced to contemplate not only life without his enigmatic companion but also who—or what—he truly is.

Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mill Millington #45 ***

From Amazon: Millington's debut novel is an outgrowth of his Web site of the same name, on which he has been posting, for the last year, comic vignettes about life with his German girlfriend. Predictably, it consists mostly of comic bickering between first-person narrator Pel Dalton and his own German girlfriend, the insouciant Ursula Kretenjeger. The couple lives in a ramshackle, dirt-cheap house in "an area of the northeast of England so dire that the government was applying for a grant from the European Union for it to be placed under martial law" with their two young sons. Pel is something of a slacker ("for me, half-heartedness is a full-quarter too hearted"), the bumbling head of an IT team at the local university library. After their house is broken into, the marginally more conventional Ursula insists they look for something in a better neighborhood. House hunting, like most of the other plot turns in the book-which include Pel taking over for his mysteriously vanished boss and becoming the courier for a Chinese gang-is mostly an opportunity for lots of funny sparring on every subject from whose turn it is to defrost the refrigerator to whether "cock" or "dick" is the better euphemism for penis. Overall, the comic material is uneven; some of it is overwritten and a bit obvious, but at its best, Pel's narration is side-splitting. There are no shattering insights about men and women, but the book never pretends to be more than it is: an entertaining and genuinely funny romp through the trials of coupledom.

To The Power of Three by Laura Lippman #44 ***

The three girls have been inseparable best friends since the third grade -- Josie, the athletic one; Perri, the brilliant, acerbic drama queen; and Kat, the beauty, who also has brains, grace, and a heart open to all around her. But their last day of high school becomes their final day together after one of them brings a gun to school to resolve a mysterious feud. When the police arrive, they discover two wounded girls, one so critically that she is not expected to recover. The third girl is dead, killed instantly by a shot to the heart.

What transpired that morning at Glendale High rocks the foundation of an affluent community in Baltimore's distant suburbs, a place that has barely recovered from an earlier, more comprehensible tragedy. For the shell-shocked parents, teachers, administrators, and students, healing must begin with answers to the usual questions -- but only if the answers are safe ones, answers that will lead back to one girl and one family and absolve everyone else.

For Homicide Sgt. Harold Lenhardt, this case is a mystery with more twists than these grief-stricken suburbanites are willing to acknowledge -- and the sole lucid survivor, a girl with a teenager's uncanny knack for stonewalling, strikes him as being less than honest. What is she concealing? Is she trying to protect herself or someone else? Even the simplest secrets can kill -- and kill again if no one is willing to confront them.