Date Finished:  6/30/2007
Pages:  548
Category:  family saga
Rated:  B
Cover:  paperback
From:  pbs
Reason for Reading:  reading cove history

For a family saga, I actually enjoyed this one. Most of the characters are developed in a way that makes the reader actually care about them. It was a quick read as well and I didn't have problems keeping up with the characters (after the initial confusion wore off LOL).

Date Finished:  6/21/2007
Pages:  341
Category:  Chick Lit
Rated:  A
Cover:  paperback
From:  pbs
Reason for Reading:  reading cove

Once again, filled with girly drama, this chick lit book did not fail to provide me with awful characters that I just loved to hate. Rachel, codependent queen, and Darcy, human wrecking ball, provided a few hours of entertainment for me. I can't wait to read the story from Darcy's side. 

Date Finished: 5/2/2007
Pages:  291
Category: non-fiction
Rated: A
Cover: quality paperback
From: my collection
Reason for Reading: reading cove

Marley and Me is truly a heart warming story, but it isn't just about a dog (like I expected), it is about a family.  Grogan takes the reader through a roller coaster of emotions, with Marley always present.  Even though Marley destroys the house on multiple occasions and has been kicked out of obedience school, I found myself wanting a "Marley" of my own.  Thank god Tweezer hates dogs!  This book had me crying, laughing, and crying and laughing at the same time.  It just goes to show you how our pets are not really pets.  They are simply family members that walk and talk differently than we do.

Date Finished: 4/16/2007
Pages:  250
Category: mystery
Rated: A
Cover: Paperback
From: my collection
Reason for Reading:  reading cove (my pick)

I really enjoyed reading this book.  My first experience with Braun was an audio book and I liked reading the book even more.  Qwilleran is extremely quirky, but in a most endearing way.  Kao K'o Kung (named after a Chinese artist), now known as Koko, is introduced and saves the day, with the help of Qwill, of course. 

One of the reasons I really enjoyed The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is because it is extremely light and fluffy.  Reading it, I didn't feel as though my life was in eminent danger the way I do with some mysteries.  Granted, those are fun as well, but it was nice to read a different style for a change.  I'm a bit sad that most of the Cove didn't enjoy it as much as I did, but that is why literature is art!

Date Finished: 3/27/2007
Pages:  519
Category: Fiction
Rated: C
Cover: Hardback
From: library
Reason for Reading:  the need for smut

This was my first foray into Jackie Collins and I quite enjoyed myself...until the ending.  What the hell kind of ending is this?  Granted, I don't expect any author to just continue writing the same book for the rest of my life, but I do expect them to end the book and not just STOP WRITING.  Yes, there was an epilogue to tie things up nicely (and I'm not opposed to leaving things open), however, she just stopped writing.  I was highly irritated!  The grade is low simply because of the ending.

That being said, I did enjoy the book.  There were all kinds of people in it, action, and adventure.  I can truly see why she is called a "raunchy moralist."  Although I didn't really find it very "raunchy."  There was hardly any substance, but that is just exactly why I wanted to read it!  I just can't get over the ending *sigh*

Date Finished: 3/23/2007
Pages:  550
Category: Fiction / YA
Rated: A+
Cover: Hardback
From: my collection
Reason for Reading:  Reading Cove

This book will remain with me for a while.  It is beautifully written and the characters have become a part of me.  I laughed, I cried, I became furious at times.  All the emotions Liesel felt, I felt thanks to Zusak.  I feel as though I have lived an entire lifetime in the four years the book takes place. 

Date Finished: 2/17/2007
Pages:  416
Category: Thriller
Rated: B+
Cover: Hardback
From: Library
Reason for Reading:  Reading Cove

Dean Koontz, in my opinion, is a pyschopath.  And I mean that in a good way.  I have not read a book by him in many many years, and this one had me checking my doors and windows several times to make sure they were locked.  Which, according to the book, locked doors and windows were no defense anyway so I was wasting my time.  It was a roller coaster ride from beginning to end. 

I do admire Billy for the decisions he made, even though they may have been different than the ones I made.  Would I have gone to the police?  Thousands of what-ifs went through my mind as I was reading this book.  Since I've never been in a situation like that, I don't know for sure what I would have done.  Cried a lot, I'm sure. 

The only thing that really irritated me was the ending.  While it makes sense in some ways, I still felt it was just wrapped up WAY too nicely in the last chapter.  Maybe I'm just a cynic.

( so i'll remember in ten years )

 

Date Finished: 1/27/2007
Pages:  311
Category: Science Fiction
Rated: A
Cover: Hardback
From: Library
Reason for Reading:  Reading Cove

My take
Thank god I'm not part of this family.  I enjoyed the story, but found the character development to be lacking and the ending just basically sucked.

From the Publisher

It couldn't happen to a family like the Greys. Surely, Dan and Sally's troubled five-year-old daughter could not have been molested as the doctor claimed. She was too well guarded for anything like that to happen. But she was destroying their home and their lives. Meanwhile, the family business was tottering, threatened by dissent from within. The pressure was on to sell family land to foreign investors, a move that divided the Greys and threatened Grey's Foods and the small upstate New York city it fed. Oliver Grey, the handsome silver-haired patriarch, bowed out, leaving the business to his sons, Ian and Clive, and Dan, the orphaned nephew he reared as his own. Ian was ready to sell to the highest bidder to buy off his mistress and save the marriage he couldn't afford to lose. Clive, the brilliant misfit, gave his life to the business until he, too, met a woman. Amanda, Dan's estranged sister, had the knowledge, the power, and the motive to destroy them all: an unspeakable secret that would link her to a little girl and a silver carousel.

My take
This book just didn't hold my attention for very long.  Parts of it would and then it wouldn't.  It took me forever to read because of it.  Overall, it was an enjoyable story.  I loved Vida Winter's story, but couldn't stand the story of the narrator.  The reason I kept reading was to get to the end of Vida's story.  I felt the ending to be completely contrived and didn't feel there was a point to it.  The end just kind of annoyed me.

From the Publisher

A compelling emotional mystery in the timeless vein of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, about family secrets and the magic of books and storytelling.

Margaret Lea works in her father's antiquarian bookshop where her fascination for the biographies of the long-dead has led her to write them herself. She gets a letter from one of the most famous authors of the day, the mysterious Vida Winter, whose popularity as a writer has been in no way diminished by her reclusiveness. Until now, Vida has toyed with journalists who interview her, creating outlandish life histories for herself - all of them invention. Now she is old and ailing, and at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to Margaret is a summons.

Somewhat anxiously, the equally reclusive Margaret travels to Yorkshire to meet her subject - and Vida starts to recount her tale. It is one of gothic strangeness featuring the March family; the fascinating, devious and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline.

Margaret is captivated by the power of Vida's storytelling. But as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction, and she doesn't entirely trust Vida's account. She goes to check up on the family, visiting their old home and piecing together their story in her own way. What she discovers on her journey to the truth is for Margaret a chilling and transforming experience.

Excerpt from The Thirteenth Tale:

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions. Just so long as they don't start on about storytelling and honesty, the way some of them do. Naturally that annoys me. But so long as they leaveme alone, I won't hurt them.

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are
the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

My thoughts on the book
Personally, I think this would make a better b-movie than a book.  I didn't much see any point...there was no conclusion.  The title didn't make much sense either.  HOWEVER, I did enjoy reading it.  It had a gross out factor that made my butt pucker on several occasions.  I would love to see it as a movie though (think Tremors!).

The Barnes & Noble Review
The adjective on the cover of Scott Smith's wildly anticipated sophomore release (after 1993's A Simple Plan) says it all: "Unputdownable." The Ruins, an amalgam of psychological thriller and literary horror à la Stephen King, follows a group of four young American tourists vacationing in Cancún and chronicles the horrors they uncover when they help another tourist search for his wayward brother among isolated Mayan ruins.

Best friends and recent college graduates Amy and Stacy and their boyfriends, Jeff and Eric, are thoroughly enjoying their summer vacation in Mexico. In a few weeks the quartet will begin new chapters of their lives -- but until then, the group is partying with fellow travelers from all corners of the globe. One tourist, a German named Mathias, tells the four about his brother, who disappeared with a seductive female archaeologist working at a dig near Cobá, one of the oldest Mayan settlements on the Yucatán Peninsula. The four Americans agree to accompany Mathias in his search but the journey quickly turns into a waking nightmare…

Like works by H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, and the aforementioned King, every page -- every sentence! -- of The Ruins is shadowed by a sublime sense of foreboding, an unsettling awareness that, at any moment, some completely unanticipated monstrosity is going to suddenly emerge and wreak bloody havoc on the characters. What were the lost archaeologists looking for? And what did they find? What ancient life form lurks in the labyrinths beneath the ruins? Discerning fans of literary horror will categorically venerate this disturbing tale of wanderlust gone wrong. Paul Goat Allen

From the Publisher

Eerie, terrifying, unputdownable-Scott Smith's first novel since his best-selling A Simple Plan ("Simply the best suspense novel of this year-hell, of the 1990s"-Stephen King). The Ruins follows two American couples, just out of college, enjoying a pleasant, lazy beach holiday together in Mexico as, on an impulse, they go off with newfound friends in search of one of their group-the young German, who, in pursuit of a girl, has headed for the remote Mayan ruins, site of a fabled archeological dig.

This is what happens from the moment the searchers-moving into the wild interior-begin to suspect that there is an insidious, horrific "other" among them . . .

I've been sick this week and did a bit of reading.

From the Publisher

Depending on the time of day, Regina Burns is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown or an overdue breakthrough. One shattered heart and six months of rehab have left her wary and shell-shocked - especially with the prospect of taking a temporary consulting job in Atlanta, a move that would allow Regina to rescue the family home that she borrowed against when she was "a stomp down dope fiend." Her stone-faced banker has grudgingly agreed to give her sixty days to settle her debts or lose the house.

Returning to Atlanta is a big risk. Last time Regina was there, she lost track of who she was and what she wanted. There's a lot of emotional baggage with her new employer, Beth Davis. Can she really forgive Beth for breaking up her wedding plans on New Year's Eve because she just didn't think Regina was good enough to marry her son?

Meanwhile, Regina's visionary Aunt Abbie has told her to be on the lookout for a handsome stranger with "the ocean in his eyes" who has a bone to pick and a promise to keep. Then a blue-eyed brother appears on the streets of Afro-Atlanta wearing a black cashmere overcoat, flashing a dazzling smile, and lending a helping hand when Regina needs it most. But between falling for Blue Hamilton and dealing with Beth, secrets will emerge that will threaten to send Regina's life twisting in surprising new directions.

My take
I actually enjoyed this book (I didn't think I would when I started it).  There were twists in the story to keep me interested, and the mush factor was lower than I expected.  The main character was likable, but it was the other characters that kept me reading. 

Brilliant.  I loved it.  And the stupid library had it (which at this point, is unusual for them to have a book I actually go in looking for).