The Adventures of a Constant Reader

     I'm back!  I've been MIA for a little while because I was preparing for my daughter to arrive.  She was born last Saturday!  We're in good health and now that we're starting to get a routine down I can work on my blog again.      I was really excited when one of the book club members requested that we read The Wars of the Roses:  The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones.  Not only am I an avid attendee of both the Renaissance fairs in my area, but I've always been interested in the history behind the British throne.  I recently found out through ancestry.com that one of my ancestors, William Duke of Hastings, was pretty heavily involved in the events that occurred under the rule of King Edward V so I was interested to see what this book would have to say about him.      I was initially worried that this book would be dry, since it's a history book, but I was pleasan...

                                  First, I want to apologize for skipping last week.   Things have been kind of crazy getting ready for Olivia to arrive.   We’re getting down to the wire, they’ll be inducing me in about three weeks!   I can’t believe how fast time is going right now!                 Anyway, what you’re really here for is a new book review.   This week I’m going to be reviewing the collection of short horror stories I finished up last week, Ghostly .   The book was edited by Audrey Niffenegger and contains 16 short ghost stories written by various authors.   There are a couple of stories that you see quite often in collections like these.   I feel like “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, and “The Be...

I finished The Death Cure over the weekend.   Overall, I’m happy to be finished with this series.   I know it was a popular series, but I just couldn’t find much to recommend about it.   The Death Cure does have more action than the previous two books in the series, but I just can’t get past the fact that they probably could have achieved the desired outcome in a much shorter time frame, with less torturing of children, if they’d have just used imaging machines to scan the brain patterns of the immunes and compared them to patterns in the brains of the infected.   Since I couldn’t get on board with the premise, I couldn’t get on board with the series.                   I also didn’t feel very connected to the main character.   Not only does he spend most of his time in the last two books either sleeping or passing out (it seemed like every chapter in The Scorch Trials ended wi...

     I finished James Dashner's The Sorch Trials yesterday.  I think I liked this one a little better than the first book, but I'm still not loving this series.  My sister hated the movie based on this book, I'm not sure how I feel about that.  They really changed the events quite a bit when they made the movie and they almost seem like two completely different things to me.  It has been a couple of years since I've seen the movie so I won't debated the differences right now.      The plot in this series just isn't working for me right now.  *Spoiler - those of you who haven't read this book may want to skip to the last paragraph*. The whole point of putting the characters in this book through all the horrible things they've been subjected to is so that scientists can map their brains through their responses.  They are immune to the disease that's threatening to wipe out the human race and this brain mapping will apparently ...

     Today has been a fairly lazy Sunday.  My husband and I did manage to get most of the downstairs of our house clean so that made me feel a bit productive.  It's feeling no a little cooler today so we've got the windows open to catch the breeze and I've been catching up on some reading for book club.  This week we started reading The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and The Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones.  It's an interesting read so far.  Stay tuned for my review in a couple of weeks.      On a sunny day when I'm reading with the windows open I like nothing better than to have a nice candle burning.  I told you I'd do some reviews of companies who make bookish products and, since I have no finished books to review right now, I think it's a good time to do so.  Today I'm burning a candle from Frostbeard Studios      I have a few candles from Frostbeard Studios and I've also boug...

       I’m going to start this review by saying that I’m a huge Tolkien fan.   The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series are some of my favorite books.   I also loved The Lord of the Rings movies, but thought they ruined The Hobbit by trying to make a fairly short book into three three-hour long movies.   I had no idea that Beren and Luthien was being published until a member of my book club nominated it to be one of the books that we read.   While I greatly enjoyed the book, it’s probably best for people who are looking to learn more about Tolkien’s writing style and how his stories grew and changed instead of people who are looking to sit down and read a good story.   I say this for multiple reasons.             1. The beginning of the book contains a rather lengthy (about 40 pages) section detailing the back story, talking about Tolkien’s habit of changing and revi...