Who is excited for a New Year?!
I did read some really good books last year, you can check them out in my 2020 Ratings and Review page but I am so excited for what is in store. I have some great books on deck. I will be finishing up my 50 Books, 50 States challenge, I have 23 left to go. I have also joined the 2021 Popsugar Reading Challenge as well! They have a printable list on their site you can download if you join in.
Continue reading New Year – New Challenge
Posthuman by M.C. Hansen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Science Horror, Body Horror, Extreme Horror
“Something was affecting the very being of every animal species in Decoy that it didn’t kill, something that caused madness as well as created intelligence – something, something. But what?”
“What are we going to find in there?” he asked, noting the hospital, and remembered why they were there. “Nothing you haven’t already seen,” said Hollie, exiting the Humvee. But it wasn’t true. There were plenty of dead bodies; however these were nothing like the corpses Kaufman had seen out in the desert. The remains here were ghastly, like malformed ghouls out of some horror video game. Most of the beds were empty at first, but as Hollie led them nearer the terminal ward, they were almost all filled with the abhorrent forms.”
“This is exactly what he wants,” he said. “He’s been luring us here from the very start.”
2020 was definitely not a normal year for any of us. It felt, at times, like we were living in one of the books we read, and not one we want to. But we made it through and are settling in to our new normal, whatever that may look like.
I, like so many, experienced an emotional tribulation that took a few months to overcome. In that time, I remembered that reading books was not a competition on how many I can get through in a month or a year but something that I love doing. I have a tendency to set goals and then obsess over them. I am working on breaking this unhealthy habit. I also don’t need to feel like I must write a blog post everyday. If I do, that’s awesome, if not, its not a big deal and people will not unfollow me because of it. There are so many other things that I enjoy doing as well and I don’t want to forget about those or spending time with the people that I love.
So, 2021 will be about having fun and doing what makes me happy every day.
2020 books completed:
36 Books
12,454 pages
My average rating – 3.9 🌟
5 🌟 Books:
Skipping Christmas by John Grisham
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
Strawberry Shortcake Murder by Joanne Fluke
Gilchrist by Christian Galacar
What Doesn’t Kill You by Iris Johansen
Dark Places by Gillian Flynn
Chasing Evil by Kylie Brant
Jamie Quinn Mystery Collection by Barbara Venkataraman
1st to Die by James Patterson
American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan
I hope everyone has a wonderful and safe New Year. Happy Reading! 😉
I haven’t read a sci-fi book in awhile. Sounds very interesting. 🤔
Blurb: The first great evolutionary leap took mankind to the moon.
The second is going to take us beyond the grave.
Kaufman Striker spent his whole life learning to be unfeeling; it took hanging himself to change that. Ten years ago, he thought he’d gotten away from being the town’s peculiar celebrity; thought he’d gotten away from his father’s warped ideas about self-mastery, but his dogmatic dear old dad has reached out from the past to continue his education with a letter encouraging Kaufman to take his own life.
For today in Decoy, Nevada, death isn’t permanent.
In an underground military facility, a top-secret resurrection project has been sabotaged. Except scientific resurrection doesn’t account for everything. Not the bipedal coyotes that stalk the streets or the thousands of missing town’s people, nor Kaufman’s own subtle “enhancements.”
Part psychological thriller, part dystopian sci-fi, Posthuman is a suspense-horror novel that probes what would happen if science discovered proof of life after death — and then nudged evolution to take us there. With deep themes and a rich, intricate plot, Posthuman has enough twists, turns, and surprises that once you reach the last page, you’ll want to start reading it all over again.
Before He Kills by Blake Pierce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Crime Thriller, Police Procedural
“Detective Mackenzie White braced herself for the worst as she walked through the cornfield that afternoon.”
“It took no more than five seconds of seeing the blonde woman tied to the wooden pole before Mackenzie knew there was something much deeper going on here. Something unlike anything she had ever encountered. This was not what happened in the cornfields of Nebraska.”
“This is just the beginning, she thought.”
Living in northern Idaho, summer time here means wild fire season. And this year is no different, I am currently surrounded by fires, one is only about 5 miles from my house. We had a horrible wind storm on Monday which caused massive damage and downed powerlines. These powerlines caused a record 58 wild fires. Living in a constant state of alertness, to be prepared in the event of evacuation, smoke filling the air. Its a scary place to be right now.
A book about Smoke Jumpers seems fitting to read now.
🔥
Blurb: His name is Connor Ford and he falls like an angel of mercy from the sky, braving the flames to save the woman he loves but knows he cannot have. For Julia Bishop is the partner of his best friend and fellow “smoke jumper,” Ed Tully. Julia loves them both–until a fiery tragedy on Montana’s Snake Mountain forces her to choose between them, and burns a brand on all their hearts.
In the wake of the fire, Connor embarks on a harrowing journey to the edge of human experience, traveling the world’s worst wars and disasters to take photographs that find him fame but never happiness. Reckless of a life he no longer wants, again and again he dares death to take him, until another fateful day on another continent, he must walk through fire once more…
7 Books
1,292 pages
29 HR 29 Min
Average Rating 3.7
🎧Of Mice and Men 🌟🌟🌟
Another Time 🌟🌟
Gilchrist 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
🎧A Tale of Two Cities 🌟🌟🌟
🎧The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 🌟🌟🌟
Strawberry Shortcake Murder 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
August was a great month for me. I felt rejuvenated! A whole new energy and I was able to get a lot of reading in. I had a lot of inventory to do at work so it was a great opportunity to get some audio books done too. I figured I would start with my 100 books to read in a Lifetime list and found the ones my library had on audio to download. I knew that reading some of the classics would be tough so I figured audio would be best.
My stand out of the month is Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, this book has moved me and will stay apart of me forever. It is so beautifully written, poetic storytelling. A story full of strength and such insight that really resonated with me.
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Memoir, An Advanced Reader’s Edition
“Nearly thirty years after my mother’s death I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered.”
Natasha shares her experiences of growing up in Mississippi as a mixed race child in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The wonderful stories of living around her grandma, aunts, and uncles. The ways that they helped shape her with their stories and metaphors.
After her parent’s divorce, her and her mother move to Atlanta. Natasha speaks about the trauma during these years with a new step father that she had tried to block out.
“For a long time I tried to forget as much as I could of the twelve years between 1973 and 1985. I wanted to banish that part of my past, an act of self-creation by which I sought to be made only of what I consciously chose to remember.” “Those two years would be like the set of bookends I’d kept on my desk back then…” “The years 1973 and 1985, side by side, with no books between them, no pages upon which the story I could not bear to remember had been written. But there is a danger in willed forgetting; too much can be lost. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I needed to most. Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, what we’ve tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly. Even when I was trying to bury the past, there were moments from those lost years that kept coming back, rising to mind unbidden. Those memories — some intrusive, some lovely — seem now to have a grander significance, like signposts on a path.”
I recently received this memoir and I am so looking forward to reading it. Thank you Ecco Books for sending me this copy.
Blurb: A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.
With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.
Strawberry Shortcake Murder by Joanne Fluke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Cozy Murder Mystery, Amateur Sleuth
“An icy wind had kicked up, and the metal walls of the truck creaked and groaned with each gust. She wasn’t the type to be frightened at nothing, but Hannah couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if the killer had found out that she was searching Ruby’s outtakes for the sight of his cuff links.”
Hannah Swenson, baker and owner of The Cookie Jar, has been chosen as head judge for the first annual Hartland Flour Dessert Bake Off competition. In order to boost ratings, they have asked Hannah to bake a dessert on camera during the news every night before the competition as well. After the first night, fellow judge, Coach Boyd Watson was not making any friends. He has a good pallet but could use some tact.
“But feelings have no place in a competition like this. Either you win or you don’t. There’s no sense in sugarcoating it. If you don’t come in first, you’re a loser.”
When Boyd turns up dead in his garage that night, murdered from a blow to the head with a hammer from his own workbench, it seems like maybe someone else doesn’t like him either. Could it have to do with his judging on the competition or something else?
