US

By Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy
Rated 4 Stars
Kindle Format
Genre M/M Romance

This book is a continuation of their book HIM.  I would have been very disappointed had Sarina and Elle not decided to tell how the story of how Jamie and Wes worked out.


Purloined from Amazon's product page:

Can your favorite hockey players finish their first season together undefeated? 

Five months in, NHL forward Ryan Wesley is having a record-breaking rookie season. He’s living his dream of playing pro hockey and coming home every night to the man he loves—Jamie Canning, his longtime best friend turned boyfriend. There’s just one problem: the most important relationship of his life is one he needs to keep hidden, or else face a media storm that will eclipse his success on the ice. Jamie loves Wes. He really, truly does. But hiding sucks. It’s not the life Jamie envisioned for himself, and the strain of keeping their secret is taking its toll. It doesn’t help that his new job isn’t going as smoothly as he’d hoped, but he knows he can power through it as long as he has Wes. At least apartment 10B is their retreat, where they can always be themselves. Or can they? When Wes’s nosiest teammate moves in upstairs, the threads of their carefully woven lie begin to unravel.
 With the outside world determined to take its best shot at them, can Wes and Jamie develop major-league relationship skills on the fly?  Warning: contains sexual situations, a vibrating chair, long-distance sexytimes and proof that hockey players look hot in any shade of green.

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain

By:  Bill Bryson
Rated 4 Stars
Kindle
Narrated by:  Nathan Osgood

I love travel books and Bill Bryson is my gold standard.  I buy his books as soon as I'm aware a new one has been released.  For a very long time I have been purchasing them in audio format because listening to Bill Bryson read his book adds an element that professional narrators, no matter how good,  just can't achieve.

For that reason I have only rated this book four stars.  I was very disappointed that the author was not reading this himself.  I should have just purchased this in Kindle format.

But the book itself was, as usual, very good. I really love his use of language and it's is a great sequel to Notes from a Small Island.  I so wish I was still able to travel because he mentions so many places I would love to visit in person.

Publisher's Summary

The hilarious and loving sequel to a hilarious and loving classic of travel writing: Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson's valentine to his adopted country of England. 

In 1995, Bill Bryson got into his car and took a weeks-long farewell motoring trip about England before moving his family back to the United States. The book about that trip, Notes from a Small Island, is uproarious and endlessly endearing, one of the most acute and affectionate portrayals of England in all its glorious eccentricity ever written. Two decades later, he set out again to rediscover that country, and the result is The Road to Little Dribbling. Nothing is funnier than Bill Bryson on the road; prepare for the total joy and multiple episodes of unseemly laughter. 

The Mother Tongue

• Written by: Bill Bryson
• Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
• Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins 
• Unabridged Audiobook
• Rated 5 Stars

I have always love Bill Bryson use of language and his sense of humor.  I learn far more listening to his books than I do listening to some of the more academically presented lectures to be found on audible.

Publisher's Description:

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson - the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent - brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience, and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't) to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

• Written by: Ben Macintyre, Narrated by:John Le Carré
• Length: 11 hrs,  Unabridged Audiobook

Rated:  4 

This book kept me listening far into the night. I never did get a feeling for what made this guy tick. I just can't imagine being able to  maintain the kind of facade necessary to pull off a deception on this scale.  What did he think he was doing?  I finally came to the conclusion that he was just hooked on thrill of being able to hoodwink so many people.  He couldn't have given any thought to how many lives he ruined.  I don't think he could have lived with himself if he had.

Publisher's Summary

Master storyteller Ben Macintyre's most ambitious work to date offers a powerful new angle on the 20th century's greatest spy story.

Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War - while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby's best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world. 

But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow - and not just Elliott's words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott's unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him - until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.

A Mother's Reckoning

By Sue Klebold

Rated 4 Stars

Kindle Format

This is one of the saddest books I've ever read.  It's been more than seventeen years since this tragedy and when I saw that Sue Klebold had written a book I bought it hoping to read that the parents of the young men who had perpetrated this terrible crime had been able to put their lives back together and move on.  

Sue Klebold's book is a well written, heartbreakingly honest and introspective account of the step by step process of she and her husband went through in attempting deal with the horrible reality that their  son had viciously killed others and then himself  

I don't think anyone will ever really know why those boys did what they did.  I just feel so very sorry for everyone whose lives they destroyed or damaged.

Publisher's Summary

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill 12 students and a teacher and wound 24 others before taking their own lives. 

For the last 16 years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently? 

These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother's Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and countless interviews with mental health experts. 

Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother's Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the recent Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent.

Death Clouds on Mt. Baldy

By:  Cathy Hufault
Rated 5 Stars
Non-fiction
Kindle Format


This book recounts a tragic hike by a group of six Boy Scouts gone tragically wrong.  The author Cathy Hufault, sister of one of the surviving scouts, authored this comprehensive account of those 19 days in the fall of 1958, following a record-breaking blizzard that came out of nowhere and took the young adventurers by surprise.

I was living at Ft. Huachuca, AZ when this happened and I remember it very well.  Hundreds of people turned out to search in terrible weather conditions to try to find these boys. It broke everyone's heart when it became apparent that the outcome was not going to be a good one.

Links:

Trailer for book on youtube

mp3 Exploring the story behind the deaths of three Boy Scouts near Tucson in 1958

Book Description:

This haunting historical adventure drama relays harrowing accounts of rescue, survival, bravery and tragic loss. It was the largest search and rescue operation in Arizona history. On November 15,1958 an unpredicted record breaking arctic-like blizzard roars out of nowhere across the mild desert terrain of southern Arizona. Three little boys are feared caught out in the open, perhaps buried under the three to seven feet of snowfall in the mountains. Cowboys ram through snow up to their horses’ necks, hikers push through monster snowdrifts, and helicopters hover at dangerous altitudes in their struggle to find the boys before they die. Re-live the courage, true-grit and anguish on the trail.

Carry the Ocean (The Roosevelt Book 1)

By Heidi Cullinan
Rated 5+ Stars
Kindle book
Genre:  M/M Romance
# of books read 2016 - 1

This is the second book written in a genre I never thought I would read. But it was highly recommended and then the cover reminded me so much of my Great Grandson Austin that of course I had to read it. I am very glad that I did.  It made me even prouder of him than I already was.  It's a profoundly moving story and should be required for the entire human race.

Book description on amazon:

Normal is just a setting on the dryer.

The Roosevelt, Book 1

High school graduate Jeremey Samson is looking forward to burying his head under the covers and sleeping until it’s time to leave for college. Then a tornado named Emmet Washington enters his life. The double major in math and computer science is handsome, forward, wicked smart, interested in dating Jeremey—and he’s autistic.

But Jeremey doesn’t judge him for that. He’s too busy judging himself, as are his parents, who don’t believe in things like clinical depression. When his untreated illness reaches a critical breaking point, Emmet is the white knight who rescues him and brings him along as a roommate to The Roosevelt, a quirky new assisted living facility nearby.

As Jeremey finds his feet at The Roosevelt, Emmet slowly begins to believe he can be loved for the man he is behind the autism. But before he can trust enough to fall head over heels, he must trust his own conviction that friendship is a healing force, and love can overcome any obstacle.

Resolutions for 2016

 I have not been doing a good job of keeping this Journal up to date so am promising myself to do a better job in 2016.

On The Island

Rated 5 Stars
Kindle

I'm giving this book my highest rating because the author kept it real for me all the way through.

At the very beginning I was a little squicked by the ages of the characters because you absolutely knew where the relationship was headed but then I suddenly remembered some very good friends who have the same age difference where she is 13 years older than he is and they have a wonderful marriage and grandchildren even so who cares how old other people are. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter a fig.

I was a little surprised at how long it took for the characters to develop the relationship but I guess the author did that to keep the relationship above board. Personally I think that in the real world it would have happened a lot sooner for comfort as well as passion.

But I really liked the story. Their struggle for survival, how much they both had to pull together and draw on inner strength neither knew they were capable of made an exciting story for me. And then the difficulties they had adjusting to going back to civilization after so long rang really true for me.

So yeah, I recommend this book.

Publisher's Description:

Two people stranded on an island struggle to survive—and slowly fall in love—in the runaway New York Times bestseller from the author of the forthcoming novel COVET.

Anna Emerson is a thirty-year-old English teacher desperately in need of adventure. Worn down by the cold Chicago winters and a relationship that’s going nowhere, she jumps at the chance to spend the summer on a tropical island tutoring sixteen-year-old T.J.

T.J. Callahan has no desire to go anywhere. His cancer is in remission and he wants to get back to his normal life. But his parents are insisting he spend the summer in the Maldives catching up on all the school he missed last year.

Anna and T.J. board a private plane headed to the Callahan’s summer home, and as they fly over the Maldives’ twelve hundred islands, the unthinkable happens. Their plane crashes in shark-infested waters. They make it to shore, but soon discover that they’re stranded on an uninhabited island.

At first, their only thought is survival. But as the days turn to weeks, and then months, the castaways encounter plenty of other obstacles, including violent tropical storms, the many dangers lurking in the sea, and the possibility that T.J.’s cancer could return. As T.J. celebrates yet another birthday on the island, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man.

November 9

Rated 3 Stars
Audiobook


But then all of Colleen Hoover's stories are good. They are just so angsty that I end up depressed even while I'm enjoying it. I know that doesn't make much sense but that's exactly what happens to me in most of her books. This book desperately needed some lighter moments to allow the reader to catch their breath and recover a little from time to time.

The story was pretty much saved from only being two stars by Zachary Webber's narration. He really is good. Angela Goethal's narration just plays on all that angst and makes the whole thing worse. Don't get me wrong, a little angst is a good thing, more than a little can even be exciting as it keeps you on the edge of your chair, but too much leaves me feeling like I've been drowned in a wave of heartbreak.

But for readers with a higher tolerance for gloom and doom it's a very good story.

The Martian

Rated 4 stars
Kindle Format

I am very much a so-so reader when it comes to the SI/FI genre.  I usually fall  into  love with them or are bored to tears by them.  This booked fell into the I Liked It category

There were a lot of technical details in it and not being a science geek most of them flew right over my head.  But the story was interesting so I just took the science stuff on trust and skimmed over what was to me the boring bits. Also having the image of Matt Damon in my head as Mark Whately helped as I have really liked him ever since I watched all the Bourne movies.

Amazon Description:

Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. 

Now, he's sure he'll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive—and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. 

Chances are, though, he won't have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old "human error" are much more likely to kill him first. 

But Mark isn't ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills—and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit—he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him?

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Life Inspired

Rated 4 Stary
Biography
Kindle
Some of what Tolkien wrote is incomprehensible to me but I did love The Hobbitt and The Lord of the Ring trilogy.  I was curious about the man and this biography took care of that.  
Amazon Book Description:


John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford. His research on Beowulf is still considered a standard in the field. Tolkien, however, unlike most Oxford dons, stepped out of his role as professor to create popular literature. 

Tolkien’s best-known writings were The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in which he created a fully realized world known as Middle-earth, vaguely identifiable as Northern Europe in a pre-history that never was. To bring his world to life, he produced detailed geography and cartography as well as a legendary background. He peopled the world with diverse types of inhabitants and created spoken and written languages for them. By doing this, he essentially created modern fantasy literature and a standard for subsequent writers to chase and miss. A British poll at the end of the twentieth century named The Lord of the Rings the most important English-language work of that century.

During his lifetime, Tolkien did not appreciate people focusing on him rather than on his writings. He felt that his writings were more worthy of attention. With apologies to the late gentleman, he is now due some notice.