Annual reading challenge 2018- Join in on the Fun

[tiggrbaby]

63/50. Old Haunts by E.J. Copperman

This is the next in the “ghosts by the shore” series, my description. It was enjoyable.

My library bought the Cape May one, so now it's in my reading queue! Didn't realize it was a series.

 

[tiggrbaby]

#89/90: Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman (4/5) (suspense)
Seven years ago, two young girls kidnapped and murdered a baby. They have just been released, and another child goes missing. Which one did it?

I am almost through the last book for the year! For a while, I didn't think that I was going to make it this year!

 

[bobbiwoz]

64/50. Dumplin’ by Julie Murphy. This is classified as a Teen Book....set in Texas and it talks about just who should enter beauty pageants. I thought it was a good book.

 

[tiggrbaby]

#90/90: In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons from 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules by Karen Karbo (5/5) (non-fiction)
A collection of essays about women who stood out for what they believed or what they accomplished. There is a bit of controversy about some of the author's choices, but I enjoyed the book.

Goal met!!!

 

[Soldier's*Sweeties]

So I wouldn’t say I’m really participating in the challenge at that point, but I have read some notable books I’d like to share with the group! I’ve been on a bit of a horror kick lately and I thought these were really great.

A God in the Shed
J-F Dubeau

https://www.amazon.com/God-Shed-J-F-Dubeau-ebook/dp/B0721NVXSY/ref=dp_kinw_strp_kin_adbl_v2

Bone White
Ronald Malfi

https://www.amazon.com/Bone-White-R...TF8&qid=1545914993&sr=1-1&keywords=Bone+white

The Devil Crept In
Ania Ahlborn

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_...devil+cre,digital-text,144&crid=17H2KV9Z544Q3

 

[willowsnn3]

#64/50 Of Blood and Bone by Nora Roberts
Second in the Chronicles of The One Series

"They look like an everyday family living an ordinary life. But beyond the edges of this peaceful farm, unimaginable forces of light and dark have been unleashed. Fallon Swift, approaching her thirteenth birthday, barely knows the world that existed before -- the city where her parents lived, now in ruins and reclaimed by nature since the Doom sickened and killed billions. Traveling anywhere is a danger, as vicious gangs of Raiders and fanatics called Purity Warriors search for their next victim. Those like Fallon, in possession of gifts, are hunted -- and the time is coming when her true nature, her identity as The One, can no longer be hidden. In a mysterious shelter in the forest, her training is about to begin under the guidance of Mallick, whose skills have been honed over centuries. She will learn the old ways of healing; study and spar; encounter faeries and elves and shifters; and find powers within herself she never imagined. And when the time is right, she will take up the sword, and fight. For until she grows into the woman she was born to be, the world outside will never be whole again."

 

[Tiggerish]

Music From Home by Geraldine O'Neill. Maria is the focus of her father's life after her mother dies. Her mother had come from Ireland to England and never had any more contact with her family. The story was that her family was unaccepting of her having married an Italian immigrant. Maria' father has a successful restaurant but also has gambling and drinking problems. He has just started to get his life back under control including meeting a nice woman that his daughter likes very much when he dies. His sudden death reveals his somewhat desperate finances and Marie ends up being sent back to Ireland to live with her mother's family. What she has always believed about that family is not true and her life undergoes some radical changes.

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline. Historical fiction. The painter, Andrew Wyeth, has a famous painting entitled "Christina's World. The book is about the woman depicted in the picture. It goes back and forth between her as a young child to teenager and the time when she met and was painted by Andrew Wyeth.

58 and 59 of 60

 

[tiggrbaby]

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline. Historical fiction. The painter, Andrew Wyeth, has a famous painting entitled "Christina's World. The book is about the woman depicted in the picture. It goes back and forth between her as a young child to teenager and the time when she met and was painted by Andrew Wyeth.

58 and 59 of 60

Really enjoyed this one!

 

[FlightlessDuck]

Not hitting 20 this year. It's been a busy year...

14 of 20: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I'm not bothering with a good reads link or description. Everybody should know what this is. I read it every year. 5 stars.

 

[FlightlessDuck]

15 of 20: The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams III

THE SANDMAN: OVERTURE heralds New York Times best-selling writer Neil Gaiman's return to the art form that made him famous, ably abetted by artistic luminary JH Williams III (BATWOMAN, PROMETHEA), whose lush, widescreen images provide an epic scope to The Sandman's origin story. From the birth of a galaxy to the moment that Morpheus is captured, THE SANDMAN: OVERTURE will feature cameo appearances by fan-favorite characters such as The Corinthian, Merv Pumpkinhead and, of course, the Dream King's siblings: Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and Destiny.

First, unlike the description, I'm not sure I'd describe this as The Sandman's origin. But it does take place right before Sandman #1 (aka the Preludes and Nocturnes book). I would suggest reading the series in order, saving this for last.

If you have read any of the Sandman comics, I highly recommend this. It puts the entire series into a new light, at least as far as some character motivation. 4 out of 5 stars.

 

[willowsnn3]

#65/50
Damage Control by Robert Dugoni

Trouble comes in threes, beginning when Dana's brother is murdered apparently during an attempted burglary. As she seeks the truth Dana must cope with a diagnosis of breast cancer and a cheating husband, and as she begins to make progress in her investigation people connected to her brother's death begin to turn up dead themselves.

 

[Soldier's*Sweeties]

15 of 20: The Sandman: Overture by Neil Gaiman and J. H. Williams III



First, unlike the description, I'm not sure I'd describe this as The Sandman's origin. But it does take place right before Sandman #1 (aka the Preludes and Nocturnes book). I would suggest reading the series in order, saving this for last.

If you have read any of the Sandman comics, I highly recommend this. It puts the entire series into a new light, at least as far as some character motivation. 4 out of 5 stars.

I love Sandman. One of my most treasured possessions is my set of the trade paperbacks from my dad. He gave them to me to re-read when I visited him one year with the promise of their safe return, then he died before I could give them back. They sit in my bedroom shelf collecting dust. I haven’t been able to pick them back up since my dad died, but maybe I will soon.

 

[tiggrbaby]

#91/90: Speaking From Among the Bones (Flavia de Luce #5) by Alan Bradley (4/5) (mystery)
An 11 year old girl discovers another dead body in her small English village and works to solve the crime. Quirky characters.

 

[bobbiwoz]

65/50. Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

As usual, cannot wait for the next one. This one has themes covering an old tittle of Baroness as well as the hunt for the drugs that Gamache deliberately let pass into Canada in the previous story.

 

[dolewhipdreams]

#26/30 His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet (3/5). Set in the 1860s in Scotland, it reads almost like a true crime story but is fiction. The author uses documents surrounding the murder trial of a man who was accused of murdering another man, his teenage daugher, and young son. The man's attorney tries to build a case around insanity.

#27/30 An English Ghost Story by Kim Newman (3.5/5). This one was...interesting. A highly dysfunctional family moves out of London and into a country home called the Hollow, which they soon learn is haunted. At first the ghosts seem nice but they begin to turn against the family.

#28/30 Lethal White by Robert Galbraith (5/5). The latest in the Cormoran Strike novels by JK Rowling. So fantastic! I was on the waiting list for almost 6 weeks for this at my library.

Well I almost made it to my goal. I had a few long periods this year where I did much less reading than normal. That coupled with several very long novels meant I didn't get in as many books as I thought. But it was so fun tracking them all to see what I read this year and seeing what you all read, as well!

 

[mmouse37]

#21 - That Darkness by Lisa Black
s a forensic investigator for the Cleveland Police Department, Maggie Gardiner has seen her share of Jane Does. The latest is an unidentified female in her early teens, discovered in a local cemetery. More shocking than the girl's injuries--for Maggie at least--is the fact that no one has reported her missing. She and the detectives assigned to the case (including her cop ex-husband) are determined to follow every lead, run down every scrap of evidence. But the monster they seek is watching every move, closer to them than they could possibly imagine.

Jack Renner is a killer. He doesn't murder because he enjoys it, or because he believes himself omnipotent, or for any reason other than to make the world a safer place. When he follows the trail of this Jane Doe to a locked room in a small apartment where eighteen teenaged girls are anything but safe, he knows something must be done. But his pursuit of their captor takes an unexpected turn.

Maggie Gardiner finds another body waiting for her in the autopsy room--and a host of questions that will challenge everything she believes about justice, morality, and the true nature of evil.

#22 - The Sleep Tight Motel by Lisa Unger
A woman on the run finds refuge in a motel at the edge of the woods, with plenty of vacancies. Check in for the night with New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger.

Eve has a fake ID, a .38, and a violent lover receding in the rearview mirror. He’ll never find her at the isolated motel, and its kindly manager is happy to ease her fears. But if Eve is the only guest, whom does she keep hearing on the other side of the wall? Eve won’t get a good night’s rest until she finds out.

Lisa Unger’s The Sleep Tight Motel is part of Dark Corners, a collection of seven heart-stopping short stories by bestselling authors who give you so many new reasons to be afraid. Each story can be read in a single sitting. Or, if you have the nerve, you can listen all by yourself in the dark.

#23 - The Lines We Leave Behind by Eliza Graham
England, 1947: A young woman finds herself under close observation in an insane asylum, charged with a violent crime she has no memory of committing. As she tries to make sense of her recent past, she recalls very little.

But she still remembers wartime in Yugoslavia. There she and her lover risked everything to carry out dangerous work resisting the Germans—a heroic campaign in which many brave comrades were lost. After that, the trail disappears into confusion. How did she come to be trapped in a living nightmare?

As she struggles to piece together the missing years of her life, she will have to confront the harrowing experiences of her special-operations work and peacetime marriage. Only then can she hope to regain the vital memories that will uncover the truth: is she really a violent criminal…or was she betrayed?

#24 - Searching For Pilar by Patricia Hunt Holmes
Pilar, an innocent young wife and mother, is abducted during a fake job interview in Mexico City and forced into sex slavery in Houston. Can she survive the horrors of a world--one which many Americans don't see or ignore--long enough for her brother Diego to find her?

Searching for Pilar breaks open the secretive and dangerous world of sex trafficking, while exploring human nature and our connections to each another. Diego's guilt transforms him from a rudderless youth into a man of purpose, and courage. While he searches, Pilar finds a strength that could save herself and a young girl who needs her. The themes of family, love, faith and the law intertwine in this action-packed tale of the Bayou City.

#25 - The Color of Our Sky by Amita Trasi
India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old village girl from the lower caste Yellama cult has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world—one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship that soon becomes a sisterhood.

But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Shortly thereafter, Tara and her father move to America. A new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow responsible for Mukta's abduction.

Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to find Mukta. As her search takes her into the brutal underground world of human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own family that might explain what happened to Mukta—and why she came to live with Tara’s family in the first place.

Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern metropolis of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship—a story of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.

#26 - On the Lips of Children by Mark Matthews
Macon is a tattoo artist, fascinated by pleasure and pain, preparing to run the San Diego marathon. During the darkness of a predawn warm-up run, Macon gets taken hostage by a deranged family living in a Tijuana drug-smuggling tunnel. The family is strung out on meth and bath salts and feeding their twin children the blood of their victims. After Macon's whole family gets taken hostage, he comes to know what true pain pain is.

A harrowing, twenty-four hour test begins for Macon to rescue his family. Their love will be tested in horrific measures. Family meets family, and mother meets mother, in a world where the saying is confirmed: "Mother is the name for God on the lips of all children."

#27 - Mao Dio by Joyce Carol Oates
A girl comes of age with a vengeance—and help from a friend—in a tale of unnerving suspense from National Book Award winner and literary master Joyce Carol Oates.

Bad things have been happening since Mia began to mature. Her dad left. Boys at school can’t keep their hands to themselves. A lecherous stepfather has moved in. Her only refuge is an abandoned lot on her suburban cul-de-sac, crawling with feral felines—one of which follows Mia home. Ghostly white and affectionate, she is Mia’s new companion and—as Mia’s tormenters will soon discover—her fierce protector.

#28 - The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni
Sam Hill always saw the world through different eyes. Born with red pupils, he was called “Devil Boy” or Sam “Hell” by his classmates; “God’s will” is what his mother called his ocular albinism. Her words were of little comfort, but Sam persevered, buoyed by his mother’s devout faith, his father’s practical wisdom, and his two other misfit friends.

Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls.

Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design—especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open—bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters.

#29 - To the Bridge - A True Story of Motherhood and Murder by Nancy Rommelmann
The case was closed, but for journalist Nancy Rommelmann, the mystery remained: What made a mother want to murder her own children?

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

Embarking on a seven-year quest for the truth, Rommelmann traced the roots of Amanda’s fury and desperation through thousands of pages of records, withheld documents, meetings with lawyers and convicts, and interviews with friends and family who felt shocked, confused, and emotionally swindled by a woman whose entire life was now defined by an unspeakable crime. At the heart of that crime: a tempestuous marriage, a family on the fast track to self-destruction, and a myriad of secrets and lies as dark and turbulent as the Willamette River

#30 - Flood Tide by Clive Cussler
Tracking a notorious Chinese smuggler's activities leads Dirk Pitt from Washington State to Louisiana, where his quarry is constructing a huge shipping port in the middle of nowhere. Why has he chosen this unlikely location?

The trail then leads to the race to find the site of the mysterious sinking of the ship that Chiang Kai-shek filled with treasure when he fled China in 1949, including the legendary boxes containing the bones of Peking Man that had vanished at the beginning of World War I. As Pitt prepares for a final showdown, he is faced with the most formidable foe he has ever encountered...

#31 - The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller’s thrilling, profoundly moving, and utterly unique retelling of the legend of Achilles and the Trojan War. A tale of gods, kings, immortal fame, and the human heart, The Song of Achilles is a dazzling literary feat that brilliantly reimagines Homer’s enduring masterwork, The Iliad. An action-packed adventure, an epic love story, a marvelously conceived and executed page-turner, Miller’s monumental debut novel has already earned resounding acclaim from some of contemporary fiction’s brightest lights—and fans of Mary Renault, Bernard Cornwell, Steven Pressfield, and Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series will delight in this unforgettable journey back to ancient Greece in the Age of Heroes.

So I read six more than anticipated....a good year! They were all OK and enjoyable to read but I really liked The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, The Color of Our Sky and The Song of Achilles. They were the standouts of the last few books I have read.

Currently reading Bird Box and like it. I watched the movie on Netflix and when I heard it was based on book I had to start reading it. I really liked the movie.

MJ

 

[tiggrbaby]

65/50. Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

As usual, cannot wait for the next one. This one has themes covering an old tittle of Baroness as well as the hunt for the drugs that Gamache deliberately let pass into Canada in the previous story.

I LOVE this series! I am currently waiting for my request to come through - hoping I get it before I head off on vacation!

 

[disneychrista]

#46 - Secrets in Death by JD Robb

#47 - Dark in Death by JD Robb


With a string of easy readers in Mid-November/Early December I made it to 5 shy of my goal for the year.

 

[bobbiwoz]

Music From Home by Geraldine O'Neill. Maria is the focus of her father's life after her mother dies. Her mother had come from Ireland to England and never had any more contact with her family. The story was that her family was unaccepting of her having married an Italian immigrant. Maria' father has a successful restaurant but also has gambling and drinking problems. He has just started to get his life back under control including meeting a nice woman that his daughter likes very much when he dies. His sudden death reveals his somewhat desperate finances and Marie ends up being sent back to Ireland to live with her mother's family. What she has always believed about that family is not true and her life undergoes some radical changes.

A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline. Historical fiction. The painter, Andrew Wyeth, has a famous painting entitled "Christina's World. The book is about the woman depicted in the picture. It goes back and forth between her as a young child to teenager and the time when she met and was painted by Andrew Wyeth.

58 and 59 of 60

Just put a hold on A Piece of the World, I think I will like it.

I am glad I joined this thread. It has helped me find lots of good books.

 

[tiggrbaby]

Just put a hold on A Piece of the World, I think I will like it.

I am glad I joined this thread. It has helped me find lots of good books.

Agreed!