What I'm Reading 08/16/09

I just started The Vanished Man yesterday. I'm confident it's going to be a good one, but so far all of Jeffrey Deaver's books have been a hit for me, so i'm hoping to continue the trend.

I'm in the middle of reading Finally Alive with my summer small group from church. It's John Piper - he is good. I'm enjoying it, but I'll reflect more once I'm finished.

Getting ready to start Crazy Love in the fall, also with church.

I realized yesterday that I probably won't make my goal of 50 books this year, but am confident I can get to 26. So let's shoot for that and then work on 50 for 2010!!!

August Reading

Here are my "guilty pleasures" from my time in Myrtle Beach

Jeffrey Deaver's The Stone Monkey was a hit.

Tami Hoag's Cry Wolf was was better than ok, but not great. Her books are all starting to sound the same, emotionally wounded hero (or heroin) carrying around baggage from the past has one last shot at redemption & love when they stumble upon a murder in their hometown. Makes for a good read, but somewhat predictable.

Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously however, was AWESOME!!! I laughed out loud, I got emotional, I got inspired. I'm in love. (I haven't been this excited about a book since Twilight!) Last year my sister-in-law & I wrote a blog about running our first marathon, so I could relate to what Julie Powell went through -- The uphill battle of accomplishing the impossible. Plus her freak outs and spazzes remind me of myself. Plus I love the relationship with her hubby. Great read. Excited to see the movie as well. It's great that she became a writer after starting her own blog and i'm interested in reading her next book: "Cleaving"

Myrtle Beach is my happy place

I had the opportunity to spend several weeks this summer in Myrtle Beach. I was able to accomplish a lot of reading during this time. I spent my days by the pool, lounging at the ocean's edge in a beach chair, on the front porch soaking up the heat, on the screen porch in the back enjoying the sounds of summer, or on the coach enjoying the cool AC most of all. But during all these I always had a book in my hand. It was great. Now, i must be honest, I really want to read books that are going to stretch me and teach me things. I usually try to read books that educate me on politics or Christianity or whatever i'm interested in at the time. But when you are at the beach, you just want to rip through a "beach read" so I have to confess that is what I mostly did. Here are my guilty pleasures from June...

When coming back from San Diego (after running 26.2 miles) by plane I stopped off in one of the gift shops to pick up an "easy read", I came across Dark Horse by Tami Hoag and wanted to give it a shot. I had finished Kill The Messenger by her last Christmas and liked it, so I thought I would like Dark Horse as well. I managed to finish it in 2 days. It was a good read.

Meanwhile, I asked my mom to pick up some books from the library for me and I requested "anything by Tami Hoag". [Why did I ask my mom to go to the library for me, you ask? Why couldn't I go myself? Well, it's a long embarassing story, and I will be happy to post about it soon.] I was happy to see she selected Alibi Man because that was a follow up to Dark Horse that I had read only 2 weeks before. She also picked up some Jeffrey Deaver for me. That is when I was introduced to Lincoln Rhymes a quadriplegics forensic scientist. Great stuff! The Broken Window was great, it had me guessing every step of the way. Plus it was fascinating how the killer uses cutting edge data mining techniques to stalk his victims. Just goes to show The Man is always watching.

Prior Bad Acts is prob the best of the Tami Hoag novels I've read but still follows the same pattern of most of her novels.

I don't read much Grisham, but I decided to give this one a try. King of Torts sucked. I knew all along how the book was going to end so i couldn't stand reading knowing full well what was going to happen. It was ineresting for the first part of the book at least.