So Many Books, So Little Time

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.  My family had a great December (other than a little bit of stomach flu) and now I'm ready for 2017!  As I'm sure it was for a lot of people, 2016 was a hot mess, not just because of current events but also in my personal life.  So I'm looking forward to having a great 2017! December was another good reading month for me!  I read 12 books for the month which I think is great.  I started out strong in the beginning of the month but kind of tapered off toward the end.  Because of how much I've read in the last two months, I managed to hit 101 books for the year which is way more than I anticipated. My stats for December are as follows: -12 books read    -1 non-fiction    - 0 historical fiction    - 0 review books    -9 library books    -3 books I own    -5 ebooks I had a lot of bookish goals for the 2016 y...

From Goodreads: In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria – sheltered, small in stature, and female – became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina — Drina to her family — had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. Yet from the moment William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favor of Victoria; insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother; resolute about meeting with her ministers alone. One of those ministers, Lord Melbourne, became Victoria’s private secretary. Perhaps he might have become more than that, except everyone argued she was destined to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But Victoria had met Albert as a child and found him stiff and critical: surely the last man she would want for a husband…...

Marlene: A Novel of Marlene Dietrich by C.W. Gortner Paperback Release Date: December 13, 2016 William Morrow, Harper Collins ISBN: 9780062406071; 432 Pages Genre: Historical Fiction/Contemporary Women/Biographical Marlene Dietrich’s femme fatale persona defined her, but behind the glitz of 1930s Hollywood was a remarkably modern woman, determined to live by her own terms. A rebellious girl, Marlene’s genteel family expectations curtail her until Germany's defeat in the Great War gives rise to the decadence of Weimar Berlin. Here, Marlene finds her niche as a cabaret actress. With her sultry beauty, smoky voice, and androgynous tuxedo, she performs to packed houses and has a series of stormy love affairs that push the boundaries of social convention until she finds overnight success in the scandalous movie The Blue Angel. As Hitler seizes power, Marlene sets sail for America to become one of Hollywood’s top leading ladies, starring opposite Gary Cooper, John Wayne, ...

USA Today Bestselling Author  Shanna Hatfield  joins us with her latest release, a sweet World War II romance. Picture a beautiful summer day when the sky is clear, the temperature is warm, but not uncomfortably so, and the humidity is low. On one of those ideal summer days, Captain Cavedweller (my husband) and I climbed a hilly path to visit the  Japanese Garden  in Portland, Oregon. We heard it was “nice” and “pretty,” but we had no idea what to expect. After we topped the hill and paid our admission at the little gate booth, we walked inside the garden, spellbound by the beauty around us. For a few minutes, we didn’t move, absorbed in the wonder of being transported to a completely different world in a matter of a few steps. The garden — oh, such a lovely garden. I highly recommend visiting it if you are ever in the area. There are ponds with bright orange fish, walking paths, raked sand, and a waterfall. In truth, in my mind’s eye, it ...

Oh my goodness, I am so glad November is over!  First, because I LOOOOVE Christmas but also because November was a giant suck fest for a variety of reasons.  Despite all that, I managed to have the best reading month I've had in years (probably).  I pretty much gorged myself on Christmas romance novels and it was pure heaven.  I plan on continuing to do that for the rest of the year because they're full of fluffy goodness. I feel bad for reading so many of the same genre but that's about all I can handle right and I have big reading plans for the new year so I'm going to enjoy myself until then. I hit my raised goal of 80 books and am now only 11 books shy of 100!  Most of what I read was library books so like I every year, I've pretty much failed at reading my own books.  I think the ones I did read this month were books I just purchased instead of just ones I've had for a while.  I did beat my non-fiction total from last year; I know I wanted to ...

 Phew!  I am so glad that October is over.  Halloween was fun but the rest of the month was just plain rough.  Work was crazy busy and I just kind of got into a reading rut.  The majority of the books I read were finished in the last week because I just didn't have it in me to read.  A lot of what I read this month was pure fluff and I don't see that changing for the rest of the year.  I think I'm going to actively try to read as many Christmasy romance novels as I can because I just don't have the brain capacity for anything too deep right now. I am on track to meeting my new goal of 80 books for the year so I'm pretty happy about that.  I am not doing a great job of reading books I own but I did still manage to read two non-fiction books in October.  Even thought I've read fewer books total than last year, I've already surpassed the number of non-fiction books I last year.  I really wanted to try to focus more on non-fiction books th...

COVER REVEAL! THE COMPETITION: Da Vinci’s Disciples Book Two! Ready (willing and eager) to see the cover of the much-anticipated second book in the Da Vinci’s Disciples trilogy? Well, we hope so, because here it is (be sure to read to the end of the post for an extra special bonus!). But before we get to the gorgeous cover, here’s what the author has to say about the next book in this thrilling trilogy and its cover: “I knew I wanted the second book in this trilogy to be a little more personal, get into the lives of these courageous women, and da Vinci himself, a bit more deeply. Oh, they are still daring to go where women had never gone before in the Renaissance, and they put everything on the line for the love of their art—their marriages, their family relationships, even their lives—to do it, to bring their work out into the open, no matter the consequence. Another form of art is explored through their eyes, through their hands. But in THE COMPETITION, I’ve pulled back more of t...