I started reading this book again tonight.  I read the Tao of Pooh about once a year if not more but the Te of Piglet isn’t as entertaining so I maybe tackle it every five years or so.  Reading the Tao of Pooh is my way of reminding myself not to take life too seriously – that there are things I can control, things I can’t, and beauty to be seen along the way no matter what the scenery.  I probably should read it monthly so I won’t forget this simple philosophy when dealing with the day to day. 

My son has a copy and tries to also read his once a year but he doesn’t need it like I do.  I consider myself a laid back person but, compared to him, I’m a bevy of nerves.  Still he likes to reread it but doesn’t care too much for the Te of Piglet.  I must admit, it isn’t my favorite by a long shot.  I don’t know why Benjamin Hoff had to ruin the second book by making it too serious and throwing too much information in there without the humor of his first book.  It rather ruins it in ways but the principles are still good to remember.

Tomorrow, after I get some stuff done, I am going to start “At Home on Ladybug Farm” to see what new adventures Lindsey, CiCi and Bridget will fall into as they continue restoring Ladybug Farm.  I wonder if the author would mind if, when I’m rich and famous, I name my vast estate Ladybug Farm…it has such a nice ring to it. 

I started and finished this book by Donna Ball in the last 12 hours.  It was recommended by a friend and I have to say, I loved it.  I am excited for the sequel “Letters from Ladybug Farm” to be out next year.

The book centers around three women who are in their 50’s.  They have been best friends forever and decide to buy an old mansion in Virginia to fix up and live in.  The mansion is on a farm so it is a big undertaking.  Without tons of money but a lot of determination, they face the remodeling not only of the mansion but also of their own lives.  Each comes to terms with who they are and what they are together.

It is heartwarming, lovely and such a nice story.  Tears visited my eyes several times throughout the book and bouts of laughter made me run for my prescription cough suppressant to contain the coughing that inevitably followed. 

Honestly, it makes a person want to find their own mansion to remodel – a passion to rebuild something from a more genteel time in America’s history.  How awesome to find oneself and come to understand that which is truly important.  It sounds so inviting to have a place that I put blood, sweat and tears into to make generations weave together.  Oh to sit by a large stone fireplace reading a good book, drinking a glass of wine, and ignoring the howling winds outside.  Sign me up!

After the first sixty pages, I sent two of my sisters emails telling them about the book and that the three of us needed to do this together.    Of course we never will but we could with a little determination.  I told them we could can food, sale fresh produce, make baked goods, etc., etc., and all stay home without working an outside job. 

I was going to send the book to my younger sister for her to read but I have changed my mind.  I’m going to go buy both of them a copy at Barnes and Nobel.    I just ordered them because our local store is out so should be able to get them Tuesday or Wednesday in the mail.  Don’t tell them, it will be a surprise.  OH, and in looking up books for them, I found the new one also hit stands this month not next year so I bought that one for myself.    I don’t suppose it shows that I love books.

It is an awesome book – the detail and descriptions bring you right into the mansion with Cici, Bridget and Lindsey.  I really enjoyed it.  Thanks Virginia for recommending it.

Just finished Lisa Gardner’s new book.  It actually was pretty good – I had the main jest of it figured out about a quarter of the way through the book but it still had a little twist at the end that I hadn’t thought of.

The story is about a couple who lives in Boston.  One night the husband comes home to find the wife missing.  The story then delves into the threads of both their lives both before they met and after.  They have tragic beginnings wrought full of the usual horrors children encounter in these types of books.  Together they have bonded into a cohesive family unit along with their little daughter.

Of course the police find all sorts of issues due to the secrecy surrounding their past and their behavior which leads to many false leads and incorrect assumptions.

I liked the book – liked the husband, of course, the most which is one of the things us female readers are suppose to do.  We always like the strong, silent type who dedicate themselves to keeping us safe no matter what.  It is the first book I’ve read in awhile so it was nice to take the time to do that.  I really didn’t have much else to do but to clean…lord knows if I can put that off for another day than I’m all for that.

I’m watching Johnny Cash who is a criminal in the Columbo series I am watching.  He killed his wife and a young girl in a plane crash where he parachuted out before the plane went down.  I have one more episode to watch after this one – then I can go to bed.  Man, I hate the idea of having to go to work tomorrow night.  My days off sure went by too damn fast.

Someone take my debit card away from me before I spend more money! I went to the B&N site to check on the release date of Alex Kava’s new book and to see if Nevada Barr’s new one has hit shelves yet.

Unfortunately, they had a book listed in their “spotlight” that intrigued me.  I didn’t end up buying it – kind of wish I had – but I decided to check it out from the library first to see if I liked it.  The book was titled “Hope for Animals and Their World: How endangered species are being rescued from the brink” written by Jane Goodall.

The description reads: Goodall illuminates the heroic efforts of dedicated environmentalists and the truly critical need to protect the habitats of these beloved species. At once a celebration of the animal kingdom and a passionate call to arms, HOPE FOR ANIMALS THEIR WORLD presents an uplifting, hopeful message for the future of animal-human coexistence.

It sounds like it would be an interesting read but sometimes those books aren’t written for layman so wanted to be sure I, with my limited scientific knowledge, could understand what the author is saying.

However, it got me looking at books about nature which is a great thing for expanding my knowledge but a terrible thing for keeping the money in my pocketbook.  I came across the following titles that I decided to purchase:

The World Without Us – by Alan Westman

Wonders of Weather – by Frances Nankin

Nature’s Fury: History of Wild Weather and Natural Disasters – By Life Magazine

If Dogs Could Talk – by Jose Zodak

Wolves: A Photographic Celebration – by Amber Rose

Big Cats: Their Power and Beauty – by Deborah Alexander

Saving Planet Earth – by Tony Juniper

I know it seems like I had to have spent a fortune but actually each book was around $5 with my membership discount and a 15% off coupon I had, so how could I go wrong? They are all hardbounds as well.  Shipping is free so that helped out a lot too.

Have I ever mentioned before how much I love books?

I started this book on Friday evening and finished it between 6 and 7 am Saturday morning.  Obviously that is why I’m so tired today but I really thought I’d be able to sleep all day to make up for staying up all night.  I mean really, what am I doing tonight but staying up all night?

But I didn’t get to sleep so I’m very tired.  Hmmm…I seem to remember having said this earlier so I’ll skip all that stuff this time.

Lisey’s Story is by Stephen King for those of  you who don’t know that.  My sister was telling me it was a scary book – I thought I had read it before but once I got into it I realized I was thinking of Gerald’s Game also by King.

The story is about a woman whose husband dies.  They were madly in love and had been married for over 20 years.  He was a famous writer & several people want access to his unpublished manuscripts.  When she won’t grant their wishes, one of them encourages a madman to persuade her.  She starts delving not only into her husband’s past but also into memories she has worked so hard to put behind the purple curtain of her mind.

It is a good story – she has several sisters who also have small roles but reminded me of my own sisters.  The madman was truly mad and her husband’s past was exceptionally strange.

I was a little disappointed in the theme of a “alternate reality” place but I realized that this book was written back when several authors were playing with that subject matter, including Koontz.  I got rather tired of it back then and had hoped this one was not about that.  However, I also remembered how, back when it was prevalent through literature, I could kind of understand it because we all have places we go to in our mind when life is threatening to drown us.

The book talks about both a physical trip to this alternate reality but also just the mental trip.  An example is the husband could disappear all together whereas one of her sisters could only go there in her mind, her body was still in the present.

I won’t say it is one of King’s best – I have a few others I liked way more – but it was good and kept me interested.  I’m thinking the next book of his that I will probably check out from the library and read will be “The Stand” which was always intimidating because it is so darn thick.

I am quite pleased with my purchases at the Coralville Public Library book sale today.  So please I may go back tomorrow to get a few more.  Several of the books are Dean Koontz – one of the few male authors I want to own the entire collection of.   Patterson use to be in that group but he fell by the wayside.  John Saul is tentatively in that group though I have to admit some of his books really, really bother me.  John Sandford was in the group but he also kind of fell by the wayside.  It leaves Saul, Koontz, Little, Crichon, and Benchley.  There are some male authors I will own who have some excellent books I really liked and others I didn’t care so much for.  Stephen King is an example of this – some of his books like The Shining, Deloris Claiborne, Gerald’s Game, etc., I will own but others I didn’t care for such as The Cell that I have no desire to add to my collection.

Female artists include Kava, Gerritson, Barr and tentatively Gardner.  I like some of the latter author’s work but some of it doesn’t quite make the grade.  I’m sure there are more considering my book list is over 7  typewritten pages long.  As with the guys, there are favorite books by some authors I will own but others that I don’t care to.  Sandra Brown is an example here.

As I told my sister when we went out for supper/drinks last night – I want to own 1000+ books.  Someday I want to have a house that has a den with ceiling to floor bookcases full of my favorite books.  When I buy the house then maybe I will buy the rest of King’s (and others) collections. 

Books are solace for me.  I can retreat into one for hours without getting up more than to refill my tea glass or go to the restroom.  I prefer finishing a book in one sitting but that isn’t, of course, always possible.  When I was a child, I read to escape what I considered a rotten life (probably most kids think their life is rotten at one point or another).  Books were key to a world so bigger than anything I could imagine and which I wanted to be involved in. 

My mother use to own dozens of books and I didn’t understand how she could keep collecting them.  Their presence only irritated me when we would move and I’d have to carry box load after box load up and down stairs from our old home to wherever our new one was.  Then I grumbled galore.  But she loved books and I so love her for it because she passed that on to me.  She said it was me taking after my father who read a book a day but I think it was a combination of the two of them. 

I love books.  My son doesn’t understand it yet but I know he will as soon as he settles into a permanent residence.  I know this because, like me, he keeps lists and lists of books he read – someday he will want to own the ones dear to his heart…I see it in him.

It was devastating to me to have to get rid of the books I collected in Florida.  I was so close to completing sets and loved going into my little den to see the bookcases full.  How exciting to have to buy a new bookcase because the old is bulging at the seams!!  How thrilling now to have books waiting for a new bookcase to call home.  I do think I will hit the booksale again tomorrow – there were so many more books I wanted but couldn’t carry…I only had so much strength!  I only buy hardbounds for my permanent collection – paperbacks are not something I worry about keeping.  Some good books only come out in paperbacks which is a challenge – sometimes I’ll make an exception for them.

It’s another state park and another murder for Anna Pigeon who is suppose to be on her belated honeymoon with her husband. 

This park, Big Bend National Park, sits on the border between Texas and Mexico.  The park sounds beautiful and must be if the picture on the cover is any indication.  It is an active park for white water rafting, hiking and canoeing – according to the book.

Anna, who barely survived her last post at Isle Royale, is on administrative leave from the park service.  She has always wanted to see this  park so her husband and her decide to go there as regular tourists.  Her husband is a sheriff.

They find a body on the river and things pretty much go downhill from there.  Everyone is pushed to their limits for survival – some, obviously don’t make it out of there alive.  Of course we know that Anna does because she is the main character of the book.  She continues to investigate to reveal who the killer is and save the day.

I like Navada Barr’s books because of the parks she writes about – she brings them to life and I find myself adding them to my mental list of places I want to visit.  Her characters come to life on the page – making you either like or hate them.

Anna makes some dumb choices in each of her books which makes her more human I guess.  Sometimes I scratch my head and wonder what could make a person be so blind but sometimes I guess people are blinded to things they don’t want to see.

My only complaint about this book is that the killer and the motive was obvious from the get go.  Granted it meant I didn’t have to work hard mentally to try to solve it but I rather enjoy flexing my deductive reasoning while reading a murder/mystery.

The book is good – I thoroughly enjoyed it and the escapades Anna gets into.  I so would have had to rescue the cow too…it is rather sad that no one had even tried prior to Anna’s arrival but guess if they had, the heroine wouldn’t have gotten the chance to save the day.

If you follow the Anna Pigeon series at all, you will enjoy this one.  We see a softer side of Anna which is also refreshing.

Well, it took three or four days to read the entire book but I am finally done. If I would of had the time to sit and read it all at once, I would have but it would have taken a long time.

The book, by Stephen King of course, was brilliant – one of the best I think I’ve ever read of his. I’m not a big fan but I did enjoy a few other ones he’s written.

There was so much the original movie left out that, after reading the book, I’m rather disappointed. The original movie could have been so much better and explained so much more than it did. There was a remake done with King, himself, being involved and it did show a lot more of the book – it was something like 4 hours or more long.

The book is about a hotel, called the Overlook, that sits in the CO mountains. It has always had a bit of bad luck associated to it but it is so beautiful that people tended to overlook (no pun intended) the bad things. Mr. Torrance and his family are hired to look after the place for five or six months during the winter when the place is cut off from the rest of the world.

Danny, the son, has a prophetic gift where he can see into the future but can also read people’s minds when he tries. The evil spirit in the hotel wants Danny to join it’s macabre of ghosts because of these powers. The spirit believes it could use the gift for its own benefit once in possession of the boy’s soul.

I liked Wendy better in the book. The movies made her out to be some sort of a ditz but she wasn’t so in the book. Because she was a side dish in the hotel’s quest for souls she didn’t see much of the ghosts or terrifying things Jack and Danny did but she at least knew something was terribly wrong with the place.

I can’t tell you the ending but it was incalculably more satisfying than the movie – so much so that I’m quite surprised the movies went with the trifling of an ending that they did. Why not go with the more grand and by far more scary ending in the book?

One thing I will mention is that, much to my delight, Mr. Hallorann, the cook, does not die in the book. He is in such a small part of the book but I liked him enormously and was, thus, in a tiff when he died in the movie.

Another thing I will reveal is that one would believe, due to King’s reputation, that there would be a lot of scares and gore in the book but that is not true. He does very well at showing how the whole situation goes from barely noticeable to intense – from Jack not understanding what was happening to his full understanding and submittal. I thought King’s character, Danny, was magnificently done and was pretty much in line with how a five year old (whose gift made him a little smarter than an average five year old) would think.

All in all, as I already said, it was an superb book making me glad I read it and wondering why it took me so many years to do so.

It is one of the books I really didn’t give a fair chance the first time I opened it because I don’t like books that flash back and forth between the past and present. I don’t like movies that do either – they rather annoy me. Ghost movies are different because the ghosts are seen in present time though they lived long ago…those are more appealing to me.

However, in reading this book again with an open mind, I found I liked it better this time around. The book centers around Anna Pigeon who is stationed with the park service at the Dry Tortugas for a couple of months. Her sister sends her letters from an ancestor who spent years on the Tortugas when the fort was used as a prison.

The ancestor, Raffia and her little sister Tilly, are stationed there with Raffia’s husband Joseph who runs the place. Joseph, who Raffia had fallen out of love with sometime earlier but who stayed out of duty, was a stern task master who was quick to brutally punish anyone who disobeyed him. The man believed, as many did back then, that control could only be maintained through discipline and hard-handed authority.

In the end, Joseph does a humane act for an old friend which costs him everything short of his life. Raffia also loses big due to Joseph’s decision and dire mistakes of her own. Their fate is as predictable as the fate of those in the present day part of the story. I mean, how could it not be? We all seem to like our stories summed up and parroting a controlled ending that is so lacking in our lives. We like our characters tucked nicely into bed with lollipops probably because it provides us with some semblance of order in our daily chaotic world. ‘If our characters live happily ever after, maybe we can too’ – some seem to irrationally reason. I’m not knocking it – I like my stories to make sense too and the characters to live for another great, though improbable, adventure.

Seeing the Dry Tortugas was always on my list of places to visit when I was in Florida but I never got around to going out there. Between Florida and the Tortugas is the 1715 treasure fleet shipwreck that Mel Fisher found before his death – I always wanted to boat over the site just to say I had.

Anyway, the book has nothing to do with the shipwreck but the history of the Tortugas which was almost as captivating. I had read about the Tortugas before – the history – but Barr makes it come alive in her intriguing story. She has a way of making me want to charter the next plane to visit the places she writes about. Well, all but the cave one – forget that.

Some day I will make it out to the Dry Tortugas and even to Isle Royale. Instead of dry history books explaining the history at each locale, I think I’ll pack Barr’s Anna Pigeon to show me around.

Early this morning, around 1 am, I decided to start the above titled book by Dean Koontz so that I could return it in good conscience to the library.  I had borrowed it before for two weeks and never read it which was bothering me so I checked it out again.

The story is about a rich young man who has an enlarged heart and needs a transplant.  His first doctor puts him on the transplant list where he waits for a bit but he becomes impatient and begins to go to a doctor who has more of an international reputation for heart replacements.  He has to fly to Singapore for the heart but gets one in about a month of going with the new doctor.

After he has the heart for a year, he starts seeing an Asian woman who threatens his life and tells him once or twice that his heart belongs to her.  In the end, his life is changed forever and all the things he thought were important, he finds weren’t really important at all.

Ok, the book takes a very long, long time to get to where he has the transplant and starts to get harassed.  The flap makes it sound like the harassment and stalking go on for awhile but that isn’t true in the book – the stalker appears infrequently and is hardly even noticed until the end.

The flaps says: “In a heartbeat (pun intended I suppose), the medical miracle that gave Ryan a second chance at life is about to become a curse worse than death.  For Ryan is being stalked by a mysterious woman who feels entitled to everything he has.”  The  flap starts out saying the book is “a riveting thriller that probes the deepest terrors of the human psyche – and the ineffable mystery of what truly makes us who we are.”

Sorry guys – it isn’t that much of a thriller and the woman never once mentions she wants anything of his but the heart that beats in his chest.  Her stalking involves leaving two gifts and giving him a nasty papercut with a switchblade…other than that she is pretty absent.

I say the thing leads up to a whole lot of nothing and I’m disappointed with the conclusion which I thought was trite and  predictable.

I was expecting…hoping…for a book as full of intensity as the book…well, “Intensity”…which kept me glued to each page to the exclusion of all else except the occasional bathroom break.  When it mentioned stalking and the human psyche, I thought it would be more about that and less about his delusions.  Whatever.

One thing I do know for certain, I’m glad I checked it out from the library rather than paying $27.00 for it.  Someday I’ll buy it to add to my Dean Koontz collection just to keep the collection complete – but it will be from a second hand store where I can get it for a couple of dollars.