5. 20 Miles per Cookie

By:  Nancy Sathre-Vogel
Rated 4 Stars
Pixel of Link
Free Kindle Book

I downloaded this free book on a whim.  The premise of the book was about a family of four who bicycled from Boise Idaho to New York city via Mexico's Baja Peninsula.

It was a quick but interesting read.  These are very gutsy people.

Here is a link to the families blog where the chronicle their adventures. http://familyonbikes.org/index.htm












About this book:

4. Summers End

 by Kathleen Gilles Seidel. 

Rated 5 Stars

Keeper Shelves

Re-read

This is an old favorite romance and it  didn't require me to use a single brain cell.

Book Description:

To their respective families, Jack Wells and Amy Legend are outsiders. A free-spirited man-of-all-trades, Jack takes life as it comes—not at all like his supremely organized mother, the admiral’s widow, and his methodical lawyer sister. Amy, a professional athlete with exquisite taste and golden beauty, has a glamorous career a world apart from her bookish older siblings and college professor father.

When Jack’s mother marries Amy’s widowed father, they invite all the children to spend the summer at the Legends’ retreat in northern Minnesota. They never imagine just how well Jack and Amy are going to get along—as affection unexpectedly flares into a burning attraction that threatens to damage already fragile familial bonds. Agreeing to deny their desire until the vacation is over—caught between long-simmering conflicts and clashing personalities—Jack and Amy find, nonetheless, that they are falling deeply in love. And passion this strong couldn’t possibly wait until summer’s end . . . no matter what the consequences.

3. 11/22/63

By:  Stephen King
Rated 5 Stars
Audio Book

I finally finished this book today.  I was 28 years old when Kennedy was murdered and the world that King has described in such wonderful detail is very familiar to me.  1958-1963 was a much kinder and gentler time than now.  It's a trip down memory lane in so many ways and I have been wallowing in it.

Anyway I like time travel books if they are done well and although I am generally not a reader of Stephen King's books I decided to give this one a try.  I am so glad I did.


Library Description:


Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students, a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night fifty years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane, and insanely possible, mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life, a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

2. Lionheart

Sharon Kaye Penman
Rated 5 Stars
Audio Book

It's taken me a while with this book but I have been dragging my feet savoring it.

This is not a Historical Romance novel.  It's a little on the dry side, more straight history.  But great stuff.  Authors don't have to gussy up stories about the Plantagnets.  You can't make stuff up about them that is better than what they actually got up to on their own.  History's most dysfunctional family.

Publisher Summary 1

The life and times of Richard the Lionheart and the Plantagenets--Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Richard's brothers--is recreated against the backdrop of the medieval religious crusades and family conflict

1. World War II On The Air

By:  Mark Bernstien
Rated 5 Stars
Paperback
From:  Connie

 I was only 6 years old when the US entered the war and 10 when it ended.  I have some memories of these years but they are only vignettes and naturally are from a child's perspective so I find these WW2 books very interesting.  So much was happening in the world and the most I remember about it are sugar and shoe rationing and how chaotic Union Station in St. Louis Mo. was when I went with my Grandmother once to meet one of my uncles who was coming home on leave from the Navy.

But really, Lucky Me to have been so little effected by it when some many tragic things were happening in other places in the world.  Reading this book and listening to he live broadcasts on the CD that accompanied this book really brought that home to me.  A real Count Your Blessings moment.
 
Book Description:

The story of World War II was told first not by historians, but by reporters. And no one told that story with more impact than Edward R. Murrow and the remarkable band of reporters he assembled. World War II on the Air recounts the dramatic stories behind these extraordinary correspondents. And it lets you hear their actual broadcasts, culled from the archives and collected here-many for the first time-on audio CD, narrated by Dan Rather.

68. Zen For Beginners

By Judith Blackstone and Zoran Josipovic
Rated 4 Stars
Format:  Borrowed Book

This book is a quick, broad and quirky introduction to a complex issue.  A friend recommended this book to me and even went so far as to loan me his copy.  I like it.  It's not particularly something I am prepared at this time of my life to take very seriously, but I do find the book interesting and frankly it has a lot to recommend it.


Book Description:

Zen from its foundation in China of the 6th Century AD, has always been more than a religion. It is an intriguing system of principles and practice designed to give each individual the experience of eternity in a split second, the knowledge of divinity in every living thing. To create a book about Zen, however, is risky. It is one thing to describe the factual history of this exotic strain of Buddhism. It’s quite another to successfully convey the crazy wisdom of the Zen masters, their zany sense of their uncanny ability to pass on the experience of enlightenment to their students. The authors of Zen For Beginners have clearly overcome these considerable risks. The books uses an engaging mix of clear, informative writing and delightful illustrations to document the story of Zen from its impact on Chinese and Japanese culture to its influence on American writers such as Japanese culture to its influence on American writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac.

66. The Cause, #23

By:  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Rated 5 Stars
Format:  Kindle

I am still jumping around in the series and  am continuing to fill in the gaps I left in this series when I stopped reading the books in order and skipped to book 24.  It's been pretty interesting skipping around.  I ought to drive me nuts but somehow it's not bothering me.  I guess I need to adapt Lord Peter's family motto "As My Wimsey Takes Me"  But I really did want to know the back story of Venetia and Hazelmere and also how things turned out for Charlotte and Oliver.  I think The Hidden Shore, #19 is going to be my next read.  What a soap opera!


Book Description:

Venetia is on the brink of marrying Lord Hazelmere when she discovers he does not mean to allow her to continue training as a doctor. She calls the wedding off, and from being the talk of the Season becomes the scandal of the year. Estranged from family and friends, she needs all her determination to continue the fight. At Morland place George and Alfreda continue to spend on grandiose building schemes despite the threat of bankruptcy; while Henrietta's cold marriage to the ascetic Rector of Bishopthorpe brings her close to questioning her religion.

64. The Outcast, #21

By Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Rated 4.8 Stars
Format:  Kindle

This book mainly takes place in South Carolina during the time that immediately led up to the American Civil War and during it.

It answered a lot of questions in my mind regarding the American branch of the Morland's and how Ashley and Lennie who play such large roles in future books fit into the fabric of the overall story.

I rated it down just a slight bit because I thought that Benedict was a little bit of wimp.  But he was James's son after all. *shrug*

Book Description:

 At Morland Place, Benedict's peaceful life is overset when a mysterious orphan arrives. No-one can understand why he takes this waif into the household, but the strain his arrival causes forces Benedict to take the boy to America, to join his much-missed daughter Mary. There Benedict becomes enamoured of the Southern way of life, just as bitter civil war is about to destroy it forever.

67. The Campaigners, #14

By: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Rated 4.4 Stars
Format:  Kindle

With this book it became clear what I had skipped from book 12 to book to book 25 last year.  It was because of James.  He is a character that I disliked to intensely that he poisoned each book in which he was a character that I couldn't stand to read it.

In this book at hour 11:59 of his life he forgives himself himself for every stupid, rotten thing he did and naturally expects everyone else, especially Heloise to go along with it.  Heloise is so lame.

But James didn't play such a large role in this book as he had in the previous books and by skimming through the parts he was in I managed to enjoy the book in spite of him.  The rest of it was good.  Liked the battle scenes.  It was bloody but not as bloody as the Richard Sharpe book was and I liked the rest of the characters.

Book Description

 It is 1815, and Napoleon’s escape from Elba has convulsed Europe. The Allied Army is gathered in Flanders, and where the Army is, the fashionable world must follow. So Lucy and Heloise both take their daughters to Brussels for the most exhilarating season ever, and romance flourishes in the warlike atmosphere. Rosamund must finally come to terms with her feelings for her cousin Marcus, Sophie meets an enigmatic French major who may change her future, and Heloise renews acquaintance with a former suitor. The looming shadow of battle only makes the dancers whirl more feverishly, but when the army marches out to face the might of the French at Waterloo, one question is in every heart—which of them will not come back?

65. Bliss Remembered

By:  Frank Deford
Rated 4.5 Stars
Audio Book

This is a hard book to describe.  It's not a romance but the core of the book is a love story.  It's about a war but it's not just a war story.  It's about the 1936 Olympics but it's not all about sports.  It has spies but it's not a spy story.  In other words it's twisty.  I loved it.

I rated it down just a little because I felt that towards the end of the story the author started to lose his grip on the plausible.  There were a couple of eye rolling moments for me but by that time I was so involved with the characters and the story that I was able to pretty much suspend my disbelief.  Still . . . .

Publisher's Description:

With Bliss, Remembered, the celebrated Frank Deford has produced a work of literature that ranks with the best of his many novels, including Everybody’s All American, which Sports Illustrated ranked as one of the twenty-five best sports books of all time. In Bliss, Remembered, Deford explores new territory as he tells two love stories from the perspective of a beautiful should-have-been Olympic champion named Sydney Stringfellow.

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Sydney begins an intense love affair with a German, but the affair abruptly ends when political forces tear them apart. Back in the US, Sydney—daring, vulnerable, and memorable—is left healing her broken heart when a striking American begins to pursue her. In Deford’s tender novel, the simplicity and honesty of choices of the heart clash with a brutal time—a time when choices seemed so dire in the enveloping shadows of a changing world.

63. The Winding Road, #34

By:  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Rated: 4.5 Stard
Kindle Book

If this turns out to be the last book in this series I am going to be sad, sad, sad!

In spite of the fact that Polly, whom I have never cared for, features prominently in the book it was a very satisfying read.  Lost some beloved characters but they had all lived long full lives over many books.  And for the characters left to make their way into the future without us the book ended on a hopeful note.  What more can we ask?  Another book that's what!

Product Description

1925. England is prosperous; the nation has put the war behind it, and hope is in the air. The Jazz Age is in full swing in New York, where Polly Morland is the most feted beauty of the day. But a proposal of marriage from the powerful, enigmatic Ren Alexander takes her by surprise. Her cousin Lennie, expanding his interests from radio to television and talkies, worries that no one knows much about Ren; but his attempts to find out more threaten disaster. In London, the General Strike gives the country another chance to show its stiff upper lip, as everyone turns to and helps out. Emma drives an ambulance again, while Molly runs a canteen, and each unexpectedly finds love, and a new career. But the whirligig is slowing, shadows are gathering over Europe, and the good times are almost over. Morland Place is threatened by the worst disaster of its history, and the Old World reaches out a hand to pluck Polly from the New. The Wall Street Crash brings the fabulous decade to a shattering close, and nothing will ever be quite the same again; but new shoots emerge from the ruins, hope is reborn, and the Morlands prove again that family is everything, and will endure.

62. The Winter Journey #20

By:  Cynthia Harrod Eagles
Rated:  5 Stars
Kindle e-book


Having talked a good friend into reading some of the books in this 34 book series I was reminded that I had not read all of them myself.  I think I suffered from burn out along about book 11 and then jumped to book 23, leaving me with about 15 more book still to read in this series.  Hey, I'm up to it.


I picked this book completely out of any order because part of it was about the Crimean Way and I have always found wars and conflict interesting.  It was another of the un-put-down-able books in this series.  I'm definitely going to have to get #21, The Outcasts though because it ended with a cliff hanger. 


Publisher's Description


The Great Exhibition brings all the Morlands to London - including a cousin from America. Charlotte is using her wealth and social position to build a hospital, and, aware of how badly sick people are nursed, defies convention to train a team of female nurses. When the Crimean war begins, and her brother Cavendish departs with his cavalry regiment and her husband is called on to serve with the Intelligence Department, Charlotte goes too. Not all the soldiers' courage or high spirits can save them from the brutal horrors of war, and as the bitter Russian winter sets in, Charlotte's nursing skills are desperately needed as the army falls victim to cholera, dysentry, frostbite and gangrene.