Review: Sizzling Sixteen

Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Maybe I'm expecting too much, but these later books in the series are not as good as they used to be. Too much is explained that we should already know (just how often do we need to be told that Lula is a plus-size woman who wears size-small clothes? or that Ranger is mysterious and super-sexy? or that Stephanie can't decide between two men? or that Vinnie is a sleazeball?). It takes up space in the book, yes. But being given everyone's specifics in the first few chapters of each book is getting old - and it's the same reason I stopped reading the Baby-Sitters Club series as a young teen. Too much repetition insults the intelligence of your readership.

There were some moments of humor - which redeemed the book somewhat (hence the fourth star - I came very close to giving it three). Someone who hasn't read the rest of the series would probably find this book very entertaining.



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Review: Plum Lovin'

Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a quick read. These "between the numbers" books are a lot of fun (and fluff). I read this one in an afternoon.



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Review: Dead in the Family

Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'll admit that I was surprised to find this book at the library. I hadn't been paying enough attention to know that another Sookie Stackhouse novel had been released. Big excitement in my little world.
That said, the book needed something else. It either needed to be longer (to fully develop more of the plot points) or have fewer side stories. Pick something to focus on - be it the conflict now that the Weres have "come out" or Eric's history (or Bill's), or Sookie's relationship with Hunter, or the Faery stuff - any of those could have been a main plotpoint with the others as side notes. Instead, we have all of these things competing for status as the "main" storyline.

Even with these complaints - I loved this book. It took me only about a day to read it - despite having to work. :)



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Seeking Sara Summers

Seeking Sara Summers by Susan Gabriel

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
Overall, I found this to be an enjoyable book. There were several distracting instances where apostrophes were misused, and a couple of times where homonyms were mixed up, but they did not do much to detract from the story as a whole and I was able to get past them fairly quickly.


Part of what drew me to this story was the title. I am always happy to find characters with my name, spelled the way I spell it. Characters named Sarah are very common, those named Sara are hard to find. To have nothing else in common with the character is irrelevant to me - I'll read almost any book with a main character named Sara.


I do think that the jacket description gives away a little too much of the plot, which made the story itself rather predictable. Sara needs to discover who she is before she can decide what she wants, and this is Sara's journey of self-discovery. However, Sara's ultimate decision about her life, as well as her husband's revelation in the second-to-last chapter, are left as mysteries until the very end - something I really enjoyed. Keeping those two secrets until the last few pages of the book is a great way to end things.


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The Lunatic Cafe

The Lunatic Cafe (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #4) by Laurell K. Hamilton

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the fourth book in the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. It is less intense than the third book, but that is not to say that it is less of a story. Anita is back and doing what she always does - except that the Christmas season is slow for zombie raisings and there haven't been any vampires to execute lately. She manages to get tangled up in local Were politics, which is not fun for anyone, least of all her on-again, off-again boyfriend Richard (who is a Werewolf). The immediate mystery is solved during the course of the book, but naturally there is always the underlying overall mystery of what Anita will do with her life when she has two supernatural creatures vying for her attention. As usual, there is a lot of blood & gore, but also a lot of great one-liners. Nothing in this series is gratuitous, and each book gives us a deeper glimpse into Anita's past and why she is the way she is.


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2008 Reading List

I did it! I read 50 books during 2008. Here is my 2008 list:

1. Days of Infamy (Harry Turtledove)
2. The Magician's Nephew (C. S. Lewis)
3. Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson)
4. End of the Beginning (Harry Turtledove)
5. The Friday Night Knitting Club (Kate Jacobs)
6. Short & Tall Tales: Moose County Legends (Lilian Jackson Braun)
7. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
8. Mount Vernon Love Story (Mary Higgins Clark)
9. Blood Orange (Drusilla Campbell)
10. Mercy (Jodi Picoult)
11. Happiness Sold Separately (Lolly Winston)
12. The Horse and His Boy (C. S. Lewis)
13. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
14. Good In Bed (Jennifer Weiner)
15. Prince Caspian (C. S. Lewis)
16. Before Green Gables (Budge Wilson)
17. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
18. The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (Joshilyn Jackson)
19. The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)
20. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
21. Voyage of the Dawn Treader (C. S. Lewis)
22. The Diary of Mattie Spenser (Sandra Dallas)
23. Bad Girls of the Bible (and what we can learn from them) (Liz Curtis Higgs)
24. Chronicles of Chrestomanci, volume 1 (Diane Wynne Jones)
25. Rhett Butler's People (Donald McCaig)
26. Emily of New Moon (L.M. Montgomery)
27. Emily Climbs (L.M. Montgomery)
28. Emily's Quest (L.M. Montgomery)
29. Chronicles of Chrestomani, volume 2 (Diane Wynne Jones)
30. Howl's Moving Castle (Diane Wynne Jones)
31. Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (Diane Glancy)
32. The Morgue The Merrier (Rosemary Laurey, Karen Kelley, & Dianne Castell)
33. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
34. Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler (Wade Rouse)
35. Those Who Save Us (Jenna Blum)
36. Anne of Avonlea (L.M. Montgomery)
37. Pushing the Bear: a Novel of the Trail of Tears (Diane Glancy)
38. In Her Shoes (Jennifer Weiner)
39. Anne of the Island (L.M. Montgomery)
40. Blood Ties (Pamela Freeman)
41. A Lion Among Men (Gregory Maguire)
42. The Art of Keeping Secrets (Patty Callahan Henry)
43. Twilight (Stephenie Meyer)
44. The Heretic's Daughter (Kathleen Kent)
45. New Moon (Stephenie Meyer)
46. The Shack (Wm. Paul Young)
47. Anne of Windy Poplars (L.M. Montgomery)
48. Nineteen Minutes (Jodi Picoult)
49. The Tsarina's Daughter (Carolly Erickson)
50. The Teahouse Fire (Ellis Avery)

I have set myself a goal of 75 for 2009.

Classic Books

This was on my friend Kelly's blog. The ones that are bold and in purple are ones that I know I have read. I don't remember all of them very well, so I am thinking of re-reading some of them soon. According to Kelly (who read it elsewhere), the average American has read 6 of the 100 books on this list. I have read 41 of them. What can I say? I've always been a bookworm.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 nineteen eighty four- george orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia- CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Pweauaion- Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoris of a Geisha- Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm- George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code- Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies- William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi- Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo